9.23.18 SB_Q by stltoday.com

2018

THE DIGITAL USER

BEST REVIEWS

E XC L U S I V E SIMPLIFY YOUR TECH SHOPPING WITH INSIGHT FROM OUR EXPERTS

WHY TRUST BEST REVIEWS?

2018

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.

BEST COMPUTER LAPTOPS

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.

Some people prefer to use smartphones. But for many of us, nothing quite beats typing on a keyboard. What’s more, a lot of us prefer the large screen of a laptop. Shopping for a great laptop requires understanding some computer jargon.

BEST OF THE BEST BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

Apple

15 inch MacBook Pro Laptop BOTTOM LINE

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

PROS

INSIDE

THE DIGITAL USER BEST REVIEWS

WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO

CREATE EXPLORE CONNECT

Lightweight and portable. Price falls on the low end of the spectrum, making it ideal for anyone who wants a basic laptop for work and internet

Dell

2018 Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Flagship

Samsung

2018 Flagship Pro Convertible 2-in-1 Chromebook

Microsoft

Surface Pro 4

Though larger and bulkier than some laptop users like, this wellmade, updated model is a reliable option and a good choice for Dell fans.

A mid-priced Chromebook that offers excellent graphics, speedy processor and easy-to-carry compact size.

A device that blends the features of a tablet and a laptop in one modern, portable package.

A 2018 Dell with responsive HD touchscreen, backlit keyboard, 8th gen Intel Quad Core processor and vivid sound and graphics. Spacious

A new Samsung Chromebook that offers a sleek, 12.3” size, Intel Core m3 processor, and LED backlight

Weighs less than two pounds. Responsive touchscreen. Great for light personal use.

Change the way you think about computer security PAGE 11

FUTURE GETS PERSONAL

Innovation in goods and services soon will be driven by artiﬁcial intelligence

BY LARRY ALTON

rtificial Intelligence has long been a popular topic for fiction and speculative essays, but it also has broad potential applications in the future of innovation with regard to products and services. The day is coming, for example, when your coffee maker — without being programmed — will brew a fresh pot before you go to work. You might even see Amazon recommend products that don’t exist until you buy them. Software has come a long way since the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, and AI is driving software toward a more integrated future, the Internet of Things, as its called. Software equipped with artificial intelligence is being used by more companies, largely because it has the ability to collect and analyze data faster and more accurately than a human. AI can track complex facets of a project and implement changes automatically to increase efficiency. Identifying inefficiencies, evaluating performance, and quantifying outcomes are all tasks AI can already perform more accurately and efficiently than a human in many cases. CONTINUED ON PAGE 3

INSIDE

Machine learning might improve the way doctors can boost your health. PAGE 7

A revamped model of a top-seller with key features that include a lighter and slimmer build, sharp Retina display, fast Intel Core i7, 16GB stor

Acer

Chromebook, 11.6 inch

A “light-duty” laptop with some standard laptop features. An inexpensive route to internet access.

PROTECT YOURSELF

YOUR

POWER UP THE HEART

A newer version of a solid laptop that is known for longevity. A great option for work and professional use thanks to its responsiveness, apps and impressive visuals.

SMARTER SHOPPING

Social media simpliﬁes how we shop for our clothes and sell our goods. PAGE 17

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

BY THE NUMBERS

Who’s not online? The percent of U.S. adults who do not use the internet. As of Jan. 10 U.S. adults

11%

Men

11%

Women

12%

White

11% 13%

Black

12%

Hispanic 18-29

30-49

3% 13%

50-64

34%

65+

19%

Less than 30K

$30-$49.9K

$50-$74.9K

$75K+

35% 16%

Less than HS High school

Some college

College+

U.S. ADULTS SPEND HALF A DAY Radio

DVD/ Blu-ray

Game console

App/Web on a smartphone

Internet connected device

Teens online

Internet on a computer

% of U.S. teens who say they use the internet, either on a computer or a cellphone.

App/Web on a tablet

Almost constantly Several times a day

:06 :26 4:10

:36

1:46

About once a day

:39

2:22

:47

11:06

:14

2018

44 Digital voice assistants

Internet browser use

56 8

Other device

Stand-alone device

Computer or tablet

Chrome 60.6%

Smartphone

Internet Explorer 12.3%

Use voice assistants

Firefox 11.7%

The percent of U.S. adults who use voice assistants on ...

Other 7.6%

Safari 3.7%

The percent of U.S. adults who say they ever ...

On desktops and laptops

Microsoft Edge 4.1%

22%

Rural

American adults spend over 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or generally interacting with media. Recorded TV

10%

Suburban

INTERACTING WITH DIGITAL Live TV

Urban

20142015

Facebook

Daily active users Quarterly average, in millions

Internet download speeds Singapore

110.1

Romania

107.0

2008

2013

2017 (projected)

80 65 65

2016

141.1

South Korea

2002

1999

162.4

Hong Kong

54 35

91.5

Department stores

Online shopping

Discount stores

Specialty stores

Q4, 2017: 1.4 billion

2017

United States

The percent of people who say they are likely to shop using each venue.

174.9

Iceland

2015

Christmas shopping by venue

Top 5 countries and the U.S. average download speed, megabits per second

Mail order catalogs

300

600

900 1,200 1,500

52 WORDS PER MINUTE, MORE OR LESS Results of the typing speed test

Typical speed of professionally trained typists in the 1970's and 1980's: 60 to 90 words per minute

16,000 Number

of people

12,000

Twitter bots

Automated accounts post the majority of tweeted links to popular websites across a range of domains. Share of tweeted links to popular websites that are posted by automated accounts

Age groups and online food

66% 90

The share of money spent on digital services by age group

12%

42% 46% Online meal order and delivery

15% 52%

14% 51%

Sports

33%

35%

Online grocery

Meal kits

CREATE EXPLORE CONNECT

TheDigitalUser.com

Gen X (35-54)

Millennials (18-34)

100

120

‘TOUCH TYPING’ AND TODAY’S TYPING

Adult content

Boomers (65+)

4,000 0

Fastest typed 120 words per minute

Average users in the study typed 52 words per minute

Tested typing speed, in words per minute (In a 136,000 keystroke test)

Total

(April 2016 - March 2017)

8,000

Commercial product

Modern keyboards allow typing with different ﬁngers on the same hand with less force than a typewriter permitted

Today, self-taught typing with fewer than 10 ﬁngers can be as fast as the old typewriter “touch typing”

73 News and current events 66 Celebrities

Careless typists move their ﬁngers quickly but have to correct many mistakes

Attentive error-free typists gain speed by moving hands and ﬁngers in parallel, pressing the next key before the ﬁrst one is released

FIND THE PERFECT KEYBOARD ON PAGE 19

Organization or group 53 Twitter.com 50

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

EDITOR Ben Cunningham, Director of News Presentation, Lee Enterprises

DESIGNER 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.

A new online study of 168,000 people found that their typing speeds and styles varied widely, and it showed some ways that fast typists differ from slow ones.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

COVER STORY

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

AI TECHNOLOGY WILL SOON BE A SERVICE

For consumers, AI already is available in the form of wearable IoT devices, smart home speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home, and personal digital assistants like Siri, Cortana and Google Now. These gadgets already are being sold as products, but it’s not a stretch to envision them becoming sold as services on a monthly payment model, which would conceivably include regular software updates and functionality improvements. For companies, AI offers multiple possibilities, including the potential for sale as a subscription service. For example, almost any company’s business would beneﬁt from the customer data and analytics insights generated by AI. As soon as the ﬁrst major corporation gets results from using AI as a service, a

rush of industries will adopt it for their business models. We’ll also see the emergence of AI-powered software as a service industry. While some fear an empowered AI, I predict that AI will change the way businesses interact with their customers in a manner that will beneﬁt businesses as well as consumers, largely because of the potential for greater personalization.

PERSONALIZATION TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL WITH AI

The more speciﬁcally a product is tailored to a customer’s preferences, the easier it will be to sell that product, and the more value a customer will get from the product. But product innovation and personalization isn’t easy — coming up with an idea for a new product or a variation of an existing item requires extensive time, research and analysis — and AI can do all these things already much

more efficiently than a human. Personalized products are everywhere, but it’s usually the design, rather than the features, that get customized. Also, the customer typically comes up with the personalization idea. For example, anyone can buy a personalized T-shirt, pencil case or messenger bag. These items start out plain, and a customer chooses the color and design. After a while, companies learn which custom designs are most popular and can begin to manufacture and sell similar designs; it’s a little like crowdsourcing the next product idea. But when deep neural networks of information can be built, neither the company nor the customer will have to generate the new ideas — AI will do it. For example, imagine a drone manufacturer that uses AI to analyze modifications that customers make to their drones. The firm’s website could offer specific customizations for each per-

son and build the order on the ﬂy (to coin a phrase). Similarly, a Harvard professor already has created an AI system that generates suggestions for new drug compounds according to their molecular structure. Using AI this way also would give the rest of the world access to people’s custom products, and the company could sell the most popular modiﬁcations as standard products. Automatically personalizing features for each customer would be effective, but it’s all but impossible to execute manually. AI’s power to provide comprehensive data and suggest accurate changes to improve efficiency makes it highly desirable to businesses and consumers alike. As such, we’ll soon see the rise of innovation in products and services sparked by data-backed recommendations from AI. And that’s a future we should Inc. celebrate — not fear.

ESSENTIAL INSIGHTS TO KNOW ABOUT BIG DATA AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Why your company needs to follow sound practices with AI transformations BY GREG SATELL

In the seven years since IBM’s Watson beat two human champions in the game show Jeopardy!, cognitive technologies have gone from a science ﬁction pipedream to a platform for essential business initiatives. Clearly, if you don’t have a plan for cognitive transformation, your chances for survival will be somewhat dim. Yet progress to this point has been uneven. While there clearly have been some successes, we’ve all had tortured moments such as trying to access a human on a customer service call. In some cases, things have gone seriously awry, such as when Amazon’s Echo has ordered unwanted merchandise. Progress never is smooth. The early industrial revolution certainly had more than its share of problems, as did the dotcom era (remember Webvan?). The key is to go in with your eyes open, understanding every transformative technology has its growing pains, and avoid common pitfalls. With that in mind, here are four things you should know about big data and artiﬁcial intelligence.

MOST COGNITIVE AND PROJECTS FAIL 1 DATA

While the potential for cognitive technologies is undeniable, most initiatives fail. All too often, managers become enamored with all the hype and don’t go in with their eyes open. So you want to be aspirational, but stay focused on results rather than “gee whiz” use cases or “shiny objects.” The best way to do that is to start with concrete business outcomes, such as increasing operating efficiency by 30 percent. From there you can move on to speciﬁc processes that support your objectives and only then can you begin to discuss technological approaches. That’s how you stay grounded. One thing most people fail to recognize is that cognitive technologies aren’t discreet protocols like the Internet was, but a variety of algorithmic approaches, all of which have different advantages

and disadvantages. So it is essential to go in with a clear idea of what you want to achieve or you’re likely to end up spinning your wheels. Another best practice is to start with a small initiative and build up, rather than trying to do a wholesale transformation from day one. More often than not, those type of massive projects devolve into a ﬁve-year death march to oblivion.

ETHICS IS EMERGING A TOP ISSUE 2 AS

Artiﬁcial intelligence has had a long history that dates back as far as 1956, when a group of luminaries met at Dartmouth University to discuss the possibility of creating machines that could learn, make use of language and form concepts. The brainstorming lasted about two months and they thought it would take about 20 years to develop the technology. Yet it was not to be. After an initial period of excitement, the problem turned out to be a lot harder than anyone had supposed. By the 1970s, funding dried up and we entered a long AI winter that lasted until early this century. When interest picked up again a little over a decade ago, researchers competed vigorously to bring the technology to market. It wasn’t until a few years ago that people began to realize that we didn’t really understand the consequences of this new technology.

How, for instance, do we hold algorithms accountable for their decisions? Now that we have machines that can learn, how are they being taught? What moral values and cultural norms should we embed in our technology? Today, AI ethics is becoming an important ﬁeld, and industry giants have set up the Partnership on AI as a forum to work through the issues. Data bias, in particular, has emerged as a massive problem. Increasingly, those who do not follow established best practices will ﬁnd that they may be legally liable for damages that arise.

EXPERIENCE WILL BE KEY TO SUCCESS 3 USER

When a new technology first emerges, the focus always is on capabilities, such as how fast a web page can load or how accurate a voice recognition algorithm is. Yet over time the emphasis always will shift to user interaction, because that’s what truly creates value. No matter how powerful a technology is, its utility always is limited to its use in the real world. That’s the point that artificial intelligence is at now. The technology already has become incredibly powerful, but we often struggle to use it effectively. We find ourselves repeating iterations of phrases into our devices to get them to do what we want. Usually, we can work around it, but it can be frustrating.

The truth is that artiﬁcial intelligence needs conversational intelligence. We need algorithms to not only understand words and phrases, but context, such as what came before in a conversation, earlier junctures on a logical chain or what is displayed on a screen as we speak. That will be key to unlocking value in the exabytes of data we have stored in our systems. We solved this problem in web technologies and devices through developing clear user experience principles and a similar effort is underway for artiﬁcial intelligence. We’re still in the early stages of that effort, so progress has been limited. But over the next few years improving interfaces will be an increased focus.

WON’T REDUCE COSTS, BUT EXTEND OPTIONS 4 WINNERS

When a new technology appears, we always seem to assume that it will replace human workers and reduce costs, but that rarely happens. For example, when automatic teller machines first appeared in the early 1970s, most people thought it would lead to less branches and tellers, but actually just the opposite happened. What really happens is that as a task is automated, it becomes commoditized and value shifts somewhere else. That’s why today, as artificial intelligence is ramping up, we increasingly find ourselves in a labor shortage. Most tellingly, the shortage is especially acute in manufacturing, where automation is most pervasive. That’s why the objective of any viable cognitive strategy is not to cut costs but to extend capabilities. For example, when simple consumer service tasks are automated, that can free up time for human agents to help with more thorny issues. In much the same way, when algorithms can do much of the analytical grunt work, human executives can focus on long-term strategy, which computers tend to not do so well. The winners in the cognitive era will not be those who can reduce costs the fastest, but those who can unlock the most value over the long haul. That will take more than simply implementing projects. It will require serious thinking about what your organization’s mission is and how Inc. best to achieve it.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

COVER STORY

GOOGLE IS USING AI TO SEE INSIDE THE

BRAIN LIKE NEVER BEFORE

Technology automates tasks that used to take hours

BY DAVE GERSHGORN

euroscientists have a lot of data on the brain — we can see it, take pictures of it, study it. But for all

the data, the brain’s workings still are relatively unknown. A paper published recently in Nature Methods might help neuroscientists better understand the structure of the brain and how it functions, according to research scientists from Google. A Google team trained an artiﬁcial neural network, the kind of AI perfect for automating simple human tasks, to sift through 663 GB of images of a zebra

A.I. ASSISTANTS WANT TO RAISE (AND MARKET TO) YOUR CHILDREN Consider the potential effects on a child’s empathy and interpersonal skills BY CHRISTINE LAGORIO-CHAFKIN

Sick of arguing with your children about how long they must brush their teeth? Ask Amazon’s Alexa. Maybe you’re weary of entertaining your baby with airplane noises while you glide spoonfuls of mashed vegetables toward their face. Or you can’t keep your own eyes open while reading your toddlers bedtime stories. Yep, your voice-enabled, A.I.-informed helper can handle it all. Amazon’s library of Alexa “Skills” — functions accessible to owners of Echo devices — is growing by the day. One particularly robust category is Kids, which includes Skills such as Amazon Storytime, Kids Sing Along, Lego Activities and the SpongeBob Challenge. With the Short Bedtime Story Skill, saying the command “Alexa, tell bedtime story to Oliver” prompts the device to deliver a personalized story with the child’s name incorporated into it. For many parents, there’s concern over children so frequently and naturally interacting with voice A.I.-enabled devices. With widespread adoption of Alexa and Google Home has come a tremendous amount of hand-wringing about kids bossing the little boxes around or just preferring to banter with them over parents, siblings or friends.

As we prepare for a generation partially raised on home assistants, psychologists are asking questions about their potential effects on a child’s empathy and interpersonal skills. “These devices don’t have emotional intelligence,” Allison Druin, a University of Maryland professor who studies how children use technology, told The Washington Post. It’s certainly too early to say what the long-term psychological impact will be. But to complicate matters even further, companies are beginning to produce content speciﬁcally for young children to teenagers for dissemination through these voice channels. And these companies, in spite of restrictions on advertising imposed by Amazon and other device makers, are not leaving out their brand names or kid-friendly characters. So while parents grapple with the price of convenient, time-saving child care assistance, businesses are jumping at what they see as a huge opportunity.

HELP WITH COMMON PARENTING FUNCTIONS

A micro-podcast for kids to listen to while brushing their teeth, produced by Gimlet Media, is simple to call up on a smart speaker. With food, pet or geography trivia, the 2 to 3 minutes of audio, called Chompers, is entertaining enough to make some children enthusiastic brushers. It even won the ﬁrst-ever Cannes Lion award for an audio skill. What listeners may not notice is that the entire endeavor is sponsored by Procter & Gamble’s Oral-B and Crest Kids.

The brands aren’t touted on the show or in ads, though, when Chompers is called up through the Alexa ecosystem. That’s due to the ban on explicit advertising within Alexa Skills. Plenty of adults are comfortable interacting with brand integrations to their voice-command-enabled devices — say, ordering a pizza by saying, “Alexa, open Domino’s.” But when it comes to children’s interactions, brands will need to be careful not to overstep. That’s the challenge facing Sprout, an organic baby- and toddler-food company, with its new foray into the technology. Working with its creative agency, Walrus, it decided that a natural extension of its nutritious-eating mission was to provide entertainment for kids — to make their food fun. On July 16, it debuted an Alexa Skill called “Eat and Sing With Sophie Sprout.” “With the rise of the Amazon devices and Google, it just seemed like a great way to inject fun in the otherwise sometimes-stressful eating time,” said Sunita Adams, Sprout’s vice president of marketing. The Skill includes nine original songs about butternut squash, chickpeas and other healthy foods. The Sophie Sprout application likely is to be used more by parents than the toddlers who’d like the songs themselves, but still, its very existence begs the question: Are we entering an age of robo-parenting? And how much are we willing to let brands control these interactions with our children? Adams said while Sprout is the ﬁrst

company of its kind to be doing this, the aim was to encourage more parental interactions with toddlers. “We developed it more as a way to get them off their devices,” she said, nodding to the notion that speech controls allow family members to control music or games without having to reach for a phone, tablet or computer. For those totally willing to let the robot overlords parent their children, there’s a Skill called “Tell My Kids,” which randomly chooses household chores to designate to children. Another, “Kids Court,” allows multiple children to hash out their complaints against Inc. one another and get a verdict.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

COVER STORY

ﬁnch’s brain and construct a 3D model of every neuron and synapse. “The real impact of this is the amount of neuroscience that can be done,” Viren Jain, a Google co-author on the paper who has been researching this automated neuronal structure problem for 12 years, told Quartz. “One thing that historically neuroscientists haven’t had access to is being able to study the actual patterns of neurons in the brain in a comprehensive way.” The data that the AI crunched came from an electron microscope, and the data isn’t actually incredibly new. The Max Planck Institute, the German research center, collaborated with Google on the project and provided the data, which it has had since 2012. It’s easiest to think of the data as thousands of 2D images showing a slice of the brain. When stacked on top of each other, they make a 3D image. But like a block of marble in Michelangelo’s studio, the neurons’ true forms were trapped in

all of that surrounding data of space and other entangled neurons. Manually, a neuroscientist would have to look at an image, identify the slices of neurons and specify each one for the computer to turn into a 3D model. Google estimates it would have taken 100,000 hours to label the entire sample, which was only a 1mm cube. The AI trained for seven days to be able to accomplish the same task. Google’s algorithm took this process and automated it, looking slice by slice and tracing the neurons through the sample. Though Google wasn’t the ﬁrst to attempt this automated process, its algorithm is 10 times more accurate than previous automated approaches. Jain said that the breakthrough was teaching the AI to trace one neuron structure at a time, rather than trying to trace every neuron in the same at once. Next, the researchers at Google and Max Planck will take this data from the bird and try to determine how they learn Quartz to sing.

WANT TO NUTURE SUCCESSFUL CHILDREN? GIVE THEM ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY AT A YOUNGER AGE 3 BY TOM POPOMARONIS

Nobody’s going to argue that children don’t need screen-free playtime. And with the internet, as with any tool, comes danger — and that goes for all ages. So acting with caution ought to be a given. But it’s hard to have a conversation about kids and technology that doesn’t summon up undertones of shame and guilt, and maybe that’s the real shame. First, we need to remember that children are biologically primed to learn. Most adults would need a lot of time and some serious motivation to learn more than basic coding, for example. Our children, on the other hand, can pick up advanced skills quickly and easily. There’s a more important point to be made, though, in my opinion. Not only is learning tech-related skills easy for children, I’d go so far as to say that it’s necessary.

FOUR REASONS FOR ALLOWING YOUR KIDS TO EMBRACE THE DIGITAL:

Technology is the future. If the human race is going to beat climate change, failing bio-diversity and the host of other problems it faces globally, technology is going to be an integral part of that process. The sooner younger generations become sufficient in these digital tools, the faster they will be able to leverage them into impactful change.

It’s getting harder and harder to live unplugged. Everything from interacting with family to getting help in an emergency now is being done on smartphones and tablets. Keeping your kids away from these devices isn’t helping them. It’s delaying what they inevitably will need to learn, and possibly adapt, in a pressing situation.

Automation is cutting swaths of jobs from the service industry. Meanwhile, the tech ﬁeld is booming with job opportunities, and there’s a greater need than ever for people who can design, program, and maintain machines. These are the jobs that will be waiting for your child — how grateful will they be to you for giving them a head start?

Asking your child what he or she ‘wants to be when they grow up’ returns a vastly different answer today than it did 15 to 20 years ago. New answers are emerging (and trending) such as a YouTube content creator, Instagram influencer or even a professional e-gamer (make no mistake, all are exceptionally lucrative). If those professions truly are your child’s ‘dream job’, isn’t it your duty as a parent to empower them with the right digital tools that will educate and inform them? One thing needs to be noted: saying that kids actually can benefit strongly from spending time with technology is not the same thing as suggesting they be parked in front of a television or be allowed to roam the internet without supervision. I’m an advocate of limiting and enforcing screen time, which is critical for balanced growth. The time spent should instead be productive, and while open-ended learning is great, some level of guidance can be very helpful, as well. At the end of the day, you’re not going to get everything right as a parent, and erring on the side of caution is understandable. But with the right attitude, maybe we can find the balance between fearing technology in our kids’ Inc. hands and allowing it to better them.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

HEALTH

Take control of your

health online I New research suggests seniors don’t use health tech like they should, but it may not be their fault

t’s said that you can find just about anything on the Internet. Yet when it comes to finding information about health, many seniors are at a loss. “Few seniors are using digital health technology,” said Dr. David Levine, who specializes in medical technology information at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “The Internet might offer many benefits for seniors in managing their health, but given current use rates, they are not even scratching the surface,” he said. A study published in 2016 in the Journal of the American Medical Association exposed this growing disconnect between seniors and digital health technology. Digital health tools come in many forms, from mobile apps to wearable devices to online interfaces. For the study, the researchers focused on functions that are most applicable to seniors, such as use of websites to fill prescriptions, contact clinicians, address insurance matters and research health conditions.

The researchers found that only one in ﬁve seniors used some sort of digital health tool. Less than 20 percent searched for health information online, and just 10 percent went online to ﬁll prescriptions or contact a clinician. Only 5 percent handled insurance-related matters online. The study used data on adults ages 65 and older, 43 percent of whom were men, collected from 2011 to 2014 by the National Health and Aging Trends Study. “It is not clear if digital health tech is going to have a huge outcome in changing seniors’ health,” Levine said. “So far all we can surmise is that seniors are not using it like they could.”

THE PROBLEM WITH TECH

It would be easy to assume that seniors simply do not like modern technology or that they’re not interested in learning how to use it, but Levine says neither of these conclusions is true. “Seniors use everyday technology,” he said. In fact, the study also found that as of 2014, about 50 percent of seniors used the Internet and 80 percent owned cellphones, which also included smartphones. He said he feels the problem is not

DIGITAL TOOLS

Digital health tools like health and medical websites have the potential to offer many beneﬁts for seniors. For instance, you can

learn about potential health problems and conditions so you can have a more informed conversation with your doctor

communicate with your doctors or other health professionals by e-mail or online chat

maintain your electronic personal medical record for easy access locate medical specialists order prescriptions online, which can ensure supplies don’t run out identify the best Medicare options and check whether certain beneﬁts are covered.

with the seniors but rather with the technology.“Many medical websites are difficult to navigate, have excess information and are just plain clunky. The result is that seniors give up and

just pick up the phone to make appointments, ﬁll a prescription or check insurance coverage.” Every website is different, but the problems most seniors face often are the same, such as too much information on one page, difficult navigation and type that’s too small to read. “The health care industry is terrible at design thinking — they often don’t involve the right people or potential users in the process. But this is starting to change,” Levine said.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

If you’re resistant to the idea of taking an Internet class, you probably are not alone. Levine said that is rarely the right approach. “If something requires a massive amount of effort, you won’t use it. You shouldn’t be asked to do extra work,” he said. “People don’t take iPhone classes. Most people ﬁgure them out themselves.” Men should not be dissuaded from using digital tech by downplaying their ability, he added. “Continue to explore websites, work at it, and don’t be discouraged or intimTribune Content idated.”

TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A DISTRACTION

No-stress ways to let digital tools sharpen your focus BY AMY VETTER

In order for your business to run the most efficiently and for your team to strive to be its best, as a leader, you have to set a good example. People notice when you are engaged, focused, organized and can balance various aspects of your life. Those traits are what motivate others to follow your lead. The problem is that we battle the same workplace distractions and obstacles as our employees and colleagues. The main culprit? Technology. More speciﬁcally, the temptation to use tech for personal reasons. In a 2018 report from Udemy, an online learning platform, 78 percent of respondents said using tech for personal activities at work was their top distraction. Of course, technology also is a crucial component to help us work more effectively. A 2016 survey from The Hartford polled more than 1,200 workers and found that a vast majority felt their work productivity is improved by the internet (83 percent), email (79 percent) and mobile devices (72 percent). It’s the ultimate Catch-22. The solution? Don’t ﬁght tech, but rather make it work for you.

Here are four simple strategies that I’ve used with great success:

1 CREATE NO E-MAIL FRIDAYS

Give yourself and your team a break from electronic communications and create human connections instead. Set up an entire day, or just a certain timeframe during 13 WAYS the day, when you TO encourage everyone IMPROVE to communicate by phone or speak with YOUR face to face. This EMAILS helps to re-ignite SEE PAGE 9 team collaboration and personal connection, which can get rusty from endless electronic conversations that are impersonal. It also can remind your team about the importance of keeping up personal interactions.

2 USE YOUR PHONE TIMER

Because of the number of notiﬁcations I face throughout the day, it’s sometimes hard to get my own work done. Setting a timer on my phone for activities that I need to ﬁnish helps me stay fully engaged. Even if it’s just 10 to 15 minutes, a timer creates a barrier against other

would-be distractions since I know the clock is ticking, and I don’t want to “waste” any time. This kind of self-discipline can be contagious to those around you, especially when others see how this works for you.

TAKE SCHEDULED BREAKS

Research suggests we work better with regularly scheduled breaks. One 2018 study from DeskTime suggested that the ideal approach is to work for 52 minutes and then to rest for 17 minutes. Following this work-rest cycle can keep you focused and avoid online temptations and distractions — as long as you don’t use your break time to check Facebook. Instead, use tech to do some activity. For example: Get up and take a walk, and use a step counter. Seeing how many steps you take (or don’t) often can give you the extra push you need to stand up and get moving. I like to incorporate yoga or meditation into my breaks. Some of my favorite apps and virtual websites are Simply Yoga, Yoga Studio: Mind & Body, and Drishtiq Yoga, which offer instruction-led mini classes from 10 minutes to an hour. I also use Headspace for a 5- to 20-minute guided meditation. It allows

me to disconnect by putting on my headphones and be guided on a “vacation” from my day without ever leaving my desk.

4 PLAN YOUR DAY.

People notice if you’re organized and efficient — and if you aren’t. Creating a daily to-do list helps to keep me on track, but you can’t always keep a paper agenda on hand. I’ve come to rely on digital apps that help me outline my day, prioritize my top tasks to be completed by day’s end and better manage my time. Todoist is one day-planner app that helps me set up simple checklists with due dates as well as designate tasks to speciﬁc team members. Bonus: it can be integrated with Google Calendar and Evernote so you can collaborate with team members who don’t use the app. If you don’t want a separate app, Gmail and Microsoft Outlook also have functions to create task lists. Technology can be the best and worst parts of running any business. By being mindful and intentional on how we utilize technology and instead tap into its strengths, you can use its power for good. You’ll become a more focused and efficient worker and the kind of leader people want to Inc. follow.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

HEALTH

HELPING TEENS DISCONNECT IN A WORLD THAT’S ‘ALWAYS ON’ Understand links between technology and depression BY DONNA VICKROY

The problem with teens and smart phones, experts say, is “they’re always on.” Both of them. And that can take a toll on their mental health. A new study links anxiety, severe depression, suicide attempts and suicide with the rise in use of smartphones, tablets and other devices. For as smart as phones may be these days, they simply don’t know when to quit. To protect their kids’ mental health, parents must develop methods for outsmarting them, experts say, and often that involves simply turning them off. Jean Twenge, psychology professor at San Diego State University and a graduate of the University of Chicago, has written extensively on youth and mental health. She released a study in 2017 that shows a correlation between the rise of the smartphone and increasing rates of depression, suicide attempts and suicide itself among teens. According to news reports, the finding is based on CDC data and teen-issued surveys that revealed that feelings of hopelessness and suicidal contemplation had gone up by 12 percent during the time period and that nearly half of the teens who indicated they spend five or more hours a day on a smartphone, laptop or tablet said they had contemplated, planned or attempted suicide at least once — compared with 28 percent of those who said they spend less than an hour a day on a device. School counselors and social workers as well as clinical mental health experts confirm they are seeing an uptick in signs of depression and/or anxiety among teens. But, they also say, there are things parents and professionals can do to help curb the risks.

TOO MUCH, TOO OFTEN

“I just came from a (Chicago) guidance directors conference where we heard from a couple hospitals in the area that treat students for depression or suicidal tendencies or high anxiety. They’re telling us they’ve seen quite an uptick, that they’re hiring staff, they’ve got longer waiting times, they’re running more programs just to keep up with the need they’re seeing among high school kids and even younger kids,” said Brian Nolan, guidance director at Andrew High School in Tinley Park, Ill. “My belief is that today’s technology never allows children to truly disengage from their social lives,” he said. Some of the allure is the desire to be included, and some of it is defensive. “They feel like if they’re not on it all the time, they’re missing something important or will miss out on a funny conversation. There’s a lot of worry and concern and stress about what’s going on in social media at a time when it would be nice for a child to step away from it and not care,” Nolan said. Questions to ask your teen, he said, might include: Do you feel addicted to it? Are you checking it constantly? Can you set it down for awhile? “I think parents feel bad (about this). It’s hard to attack a thing we don’t fully understand ourselves, because we didn’t grow up with it,” he said. But, Nolan added, “modeling is a big piece of this. We as adults sometimes stop conversations with our own children because we have a text message coming in. Or we’ll text at the dinner table or while driving. So, we’re teaching our children that what comes through the cell phone is immediate and important and that it should take precedence over what we are currently doing.”

WIDENING THE LENS

Technology may not be the lone culprit, and it is not necessarily bad, said Nadjeh Awadallah, licensed clinical professional therapist at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, Ill. The current increase in depression and anxiety among teens might be attributed to a higher frequency of smartphone use and the fact there’s less stigma about mental health issues, Awadallah said. “Kids are more prone to speaking about mental health issues than maybe they were before,” he said. A lot of adolescents, he said, would argue that the relationships they have with people online are real relationships. “If they’re interacting at a high level of frequency, either talking with friends or playing video games, they’re actually interacting with them,” he said. And a cell phone can be a kind of “digital security blanket” in that it enables a person who is dealing with anxiety to look at their phone instead of at other people. “It’s kind of protective if you want to be left alone,” he said. “There’s a high correlation between people withdrawing from person-to-person interaction and depression because that’s what people tend to do when they’re depressed. So it’s kind of like a chicken and egg relationship where you don’t know if they’re depressed because they’re on electronic media or if they’re on electronic media because they’re deDaily Southtown pressed.”

Helping the

heart

Machine learning may improve the way doctors detect heart disease

magine a world in which a photo of your eye — taken with your smartphone — could determine your risk of a heart attack, and your smartwatch could estimate your odds of experiencing a stroke. Sounds pretty futuristic, right? In fact, preliminary studies showing the feasibility of both approaches already have been published. They’re just two examples of the new wave of technology-based innovations that are beginning to change health care as we know it. “There are clear opportunities to improve our ability to screen, diagnose, monitor and treat people with many diseases using advanced technologies,” said Dr. Maulik Majmudar, associate director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. Currently, much of what we know about why people get heart disease comes from population studies. Researchers have followed groups of people over time, noted who had heart attacks or strokes, and then looked back at the people’s health habits and characteristics to identify which ones correlated with those health outcomes. Doctors treat people based on these well-known risk factors, which include smoking, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. “But maybe there aren’t just ﬁve to 10 risk factors, but 200,” Majmudar said. Our brains have a ﬁnite amount of computational ability, but machine learning can

accommodate a far larger volume of variables. A computer can take millions of data points and come up with models that might predict risk much more precisely, he explained. “In the future, we might be able to capture all the health data in a person’s electronic health record and process it with advanced machine learning,” Majmudar said. In the cardiology realm, two promising applications include retina scans to predict heart disease and pulse monitoring to pick up atrial ﬁbrillation. Experts also hope advanced technologies might one day discover better ways to noninvasively detect coronary artery blockages and better predict cardiac arrest, when the heart suddenly stops beating without warning.

EYE SPY HEART DISEASE

Blood vessels in the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye, reﬂect the health of blood vessels throughout your body. So researchers collected retina photos and other health data from more than 280,000 people. They used machine learning to create an algorithm to predict a person’s risk of heart attack or stroke based on subtle differences in the vessels visible in the photos. To test the algorithm, they compared retina photos from people who had a major cardiac event within ﬁve years of the photo with retina photos of people who had not. The algorithm was accurate 70 percent of the time.

“What’s fascinating is that a single image of the retina is about as accurate for predicting a heart attack as using traditional risk factors, such as age, blood pressure and cholesterol,” Majmudar said. The model still needs to be validated in more people. But if it is proven accurate, a quick photo would be far simpler than getting a blood test and blood pressure measurement, he said.

WATCH TO FIND AFIB

Doctors have long sought a better way to detect atrial fibrillation. This rapid, irregular heart rhythm often has no symptoms, but it raises the risk of stroke fivefold. Researchers wonder if the sensors found in smartwatches that track your heart rate could also detect afib. The Apple Heart Study, launched in November 2017, is testing an afib detection app on an Apple Watch in up to a half-million volunteers. If the app detects an irregular heart rhythm, the participant will receive a notification via their watch and iPhone, a free consultation with a doctor, and an ECG patch for additional monitoring. “If the study succeeds, it would be a tremendous advance and radically transform our approach to screening people for [afib],” Majmudar said. It’s not unusual for people with afib to remain undiagnosed until they experience a stroke. Earlier detection would enable people to start taking anti-clotting medications to lower their risk, Tribune Content Agency he said.

SIDE EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY Repetitive motion and poor posture common causes of aches and pains

You’ve mastered the art of texting, emailing and web surﬁng on your smartphone and computer. But along with that digital prowess, you’ve picked up an unexpected side effect. “We get a number of patients who develop injuries from these activities,” said Dr. Tamara Rozental, an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in hand, wrist and elbow disorders at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

HAND PAIN

The repetitive motions of texting and typing can lead to general hand pain from underlying osteoarthritis (the wearing away of cartilage in the joints). “Using these gadgets doesn’t cause osteoarthritis, but if you’re prone to it, it can increase your symptoms,” Rozental said. Using your thumbs too much to text can cause strain or overuse injuries of the tendons that run from the wrist to the thumb, a condition called De Quervain’s tenosynovitis. Symptoms include pain over the thumb side of the wrist, which can appear gradually or suddenly and move up the forearm. Pushing buttons too hard with your ﬁngers can lead to inﬂammation

around the tendons and pulleys that enable the ﬁngers to bend, increasing the risk for trigger ﬁnger (stenosing tenosynovitis). Symptoms include pain, popping and a feeling that the digit is locking when you bend or straighten it.

permanent back or neck problems. “But it’s uncomfortable, and it can also irritate the occipital nerve where the spine connects to the base of the skull, which can cause headaches,” he explained.

NECK AND BACK PAIN

Hand or wrist conditions: Take a break from the offending activity. You’ll also have to modify the way you use electronic devices. If texting with your thumbs causes pain, you may need to use other ﬁngers to text, or use a stylus. Back and neck pain: Adjust your posture when using a device. “Keep your gaze parallel to the ﬂoor as opposed to downward,” White suggests. It’s helpful to raise the computer monitor so it’s level with your eyes. Do the same with handheld devices by propping them on a few pillows.

Looking down at an electronic gadget for long periods can lead to neck and back pain. “You’re stretching the muscles, ligaments, and tendons in your neck and upper back,” explained Dr. Andrew White, an orthopedic surgeon and co-director at the Spine Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “It’s the posture and the amount of time in that posture that matters.” White said this type of pain is temporary and won’t cause

FIXES AND TREATMENTS

Tribune Content Agency

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

SOCIETY

cloud? WHAT’S UP WITH THE

Teach yourself how your apps and information are stored on the internet

BY CONSTANCE BRINKLEY-BADGETT

ontrary to the naming convention, “the cloud” isn’t ﬂoating somewhere out in the ether. It’s actually made up of physical locations that house software, hardware and services that run on the internet (the cloud) as opposed to running locally on your device. There is not just one cloud; many “clouds” are run by big and small companies, universities and the government. Cloud providers offer many services such as online applications, computing power, data storage, infrastructure and SaaS (software as a service) where providers deliver an application to users through a browser.

BENEFITS OF THE CLOUD

It’s cheap. For small businesses, the savings include fewer hardware and software purchases, less space to house hardware, fewer resources to maintain the hardware and less electricity to power and cool those systems. It’s convenient. When the data or application you want to access lives in the cloud, you can access it from most any device in any location as long as you have access to the internet. That means you and your employees can access ﬁles and other work materials securely from anywhere in the world. It’s scalable. Individuals and businesses often pay only for what is used

— storage, computing and applications. Cloud computing quickly can allocate and manage resources to accommodate business IT requirements and fluctuations without the need to purchase, configure and maintain large data centers and staff. It’s safe. Or is it? While it is simple and inexpensive to utilize the cloud, there are some risks. Whether your data is stored in a private or public cloud, there always is the risk of a data breach. Most cloud providers have great security protocols and track records. However, several high-profile hacks have made the news, including movies leaked before their release dates, compromising photos of celebrities as well as leaks of personal data including names, addresses and social security numbers. Most companies have stepped up their security, but the risk remains as hackers continue to find ways to access large amounts of data in search of their next big score.

WHO INVENTED THE CLOUD?

There are many contributions that led to the creation of cloud computing, including those of J.C.R. Licklider, the developer of ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet. However, many of the concepts of cloud computing can be traced back to the ’60s when Professor John McCarthy, a computer scientist, ﬁrst proposed a computing service that could be orga-

nized much like a public utility. In 1966, Douglas Parkhill wrote, “The Challenge of the Computer Utility,” which outlined many of today’s capabilities in the cloud including unlimited supply and scalability comparing it to the public utility model of access and distribution. They were quite the visionaries since at the time we still were utilizing punch cards on mainframe computers that took up whole rooms for data processing. In the ’70s, the cost of computing was becoming prohibitive, which opened the door to service bureaus that maintained supercomputers and allowed companies to share in the cost and processing power. “Dummy” terminals allowed users to enter send requests to be routed to the correct application. In the ’80s, the internet and personal computers changed the way individuals and businesses interacted with each other. Although not yet focused on the interconnectivity of things, processing moved from service bureaus to the individual PC or centralized data centers with much more connectivity and speed.

WHEN DID THE CLOUD GO MAINSTREAM?

It wasn’t until the ’90s when mobile devices exploded on the scene that the idea of cloud computing became the norm. Since mobile devices lacked the storage and processing capabilities

THIS TECHNOLOGY IS ABOUT TO CHANGE THE WORLD — BUT NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT Faster processing speeds are key to enhancements in wide variety of industries BY MARC EMMER

You’ve heard it all before. Augmented reality, virtual reality, AI, robots, blah, blah, blah. 5G is the ugly duckling of technology, yet it is the one that will radically change the world. According to the MIT Technology Review, 5G is a “technological paradigm shift, akin to the shift from the typewriter to the computer.” While another reference to Moore’s Law — Gordon Moore’s prediction that processing speeds would double about every 18 months at lower prices — makes me want to heave, it remains true to form. 5G will represent the greatest leap in processing speed since computing began, and it’s predicted that 5G will be a staggering 20 times faster than 4G. Its true impact will not be felt only as a result of faster processing. 5G is an entirely different technology, utilizing new radio frequencies and shorter wavelengths, providing a level of connectivity the world has never seen. Here are seven ways small- and mid-market businesses will beneﬁt.

1 3D

One technology that has not broken through is holographic projection, the technology offered in head-mounted displays. While technologies such as Google Glass were a ﬂop, they were introduced prematurely. The business implications for 3D are enormous.

In the near future, business meetings will be held in 3D, allowing for more meaningful modeling, use of CAD drawings and more “lifelike” presentations. 3D will be a new world.

2 ENHANCED VIDEO

Companies will have access to higher resolution video with low latency. While this has implications for everything from video games to marketing, perhaps the most immediate impact will be in recruiting. Companies use video for recruiting, but in a clumsy fashion and usually only as a supplement for face-to-face interviews. Enhanced video will allow companies to expand the reach of whom they recruit and promote a faster process.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR COMPANIES 3 TELECOM

World War III has broken out in telecommunications,where Qualcomm has developed a modem that will deliver 5G.But the company is saddled by ongoing anti-trust issues with the EU, Apple and others. To date,the major cell phone carriers have not announced plans for 5G-enabled phones to be released in the near future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the telecommunications industry employs over 760,000 workers, many of whom will take part in the rollout of 5G and related technologies.The greatest opportunities emerge when there is chaos in a market, and this market deﬁnes chaos.

4 HEALTHCARE

Today’s implanted wireless devices are unreliable. MIT News says the use of Internet of Things in healthcare-enabled devices will dramatically expand, allow-

ing patients and care providers real-time data and more predictive care.

5 SMARTER HOMES AND CITIES

5G will be the spark to ignite IoT as home and business devices like security, lighting and audio will become more capable and cheaper to operate. Companies in this space will thrive. Companies in 5G-enabled cities will have an advantage over those who do not. AT&T is rolling out 5G in phases, beginning with this year’s watered-down version expanding into 140 markets.

CONNECTIVITY CUSTOMERS 6 FOR

According to The International Journal of ICT Economy, Governance and Society, 5G will provide connectivity to 90 percent of the world’s population by 2027. Companies offering payment systems, healthcare and business services to developing nations will have access to new markets and customers.

7 AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Hype about autonomous vehicles has been muted by recent accidents that highlight their unreliability. For roadways to support millions of autonomous vehicles, it will require more reliable networks. 5G will allow autonomous vehicles to better detect hazards, communicate with other vehicles, interact with smart signage and follow more precise maps. The commercial applications of autonomous vehicles will be substantial, cutting labor and reducing delivery times in the supply chain. Inc. GordonMooremustbesoproud.

of a PC, there had to be a way to securely run applications and store data remotely. As mobile devices became “smart” and started to connect with other devices, the cloud allowed for even more convenience. The cloud as we know it today is primarily attributed to the rise of Amazon when they debuted their Amazon Web Service in 2006. AWS offered computing power, database storage, developer tools and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow, making the cloud accessible and affordable to many.

WHERE IS IT ALL HEADING?

With cloud computing still in its youth, the sky is the limit. RightScale, a SaaS company, recently published it’s annual State of the Cloud Report, which indicates cloud usage continues to grow among large and small businesses. The report indicates more money is being allocated to public, private and hybrid cloud solutions and that many companies are running a majority of their workloads in the cloud. Another big driver is the Internet of Things — our everyday items that now are computerized, like home security systems, smart thermostats and appliances, etc. With the increase in spending on the development of cloud computing, look for more of your data and applications at work to move to the cloud and for more exciting advances in perInc. sonal computing.

VERIZON TO LAUNCH 5G HOME BROADBAND THIS OCTOBER Verizon is the first mobile carrier to offer home broadband via 5G: The company announced in September that it will start offering wireless home broadband service in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Houston and Indianapolis starting Oct. 1. Consumers are able to sign up — and check whether their neighborhood is actually within the coverage area — on Verizon’s website. As part of the package for those first in line, the company is offering three free months of 5G broadband service as well as either a free Apple TV 4K or a free Chromecast Ultra, and also three free months of YouTube TV. Existing Verizon wireless customers will be able to get the new service for $50 per month, whereas consumers without a Verizon wireless plan will have to pay $70 per month. Once launched, Verizon’s broadband is expected to provide internet access with speeds of up to 1 Gbps at peak times, and average download speeds of 300 Mbps. Verizon is promising that it won’t institute any data caps, meaning that consumers won’t be punished if they use the service more heavily. RYOT, the immersive media studio of Verizon’s Oath subsidiary, also announced recently that it was going to launch a new studio facility in Los Angeles that will heavily focus on new technologies enabled by 5G. For instance, the studio will use a mobile capture suit to make use of motion capture technology in the field.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

SOCIETY

TV shows, books, movies we love about the future of technology BY JESSICA R. HIBBARD

In an interview earlier this year with the New York Times, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he could have never imagined a future in which the software he developed would be used to interfere with elections. But many have warned about the potential for misuse, and it’s not a stretch to think that the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which involved the misuse of data from millions of Facebook users, is just the tip of the iceberg. Tech ethics may seem like an abstract concept best left to philosophers and lawyers, but you don’t need to pass the bar or get a PhD to predict the unintended consequences of technology — you may just need to read books and watch movies. If you want to understand how technologies like artificial intelligence may shape the future of health, romance, law, and government, you could do worse than to ask a sci-fi writer. Through fictional stories, creative thinkers of the past and present can help technologists anticipate challenges and opportunities created by technology. The fiction enthusiasts at Luminary Labs generated a list of books, movies and television shows that should be on every technologist’s radar. If you care about the impact of technology on our lives and want to imagine a wider range of possibilities, start with this small sampling of stories. 1984, in which “Big Brother” and the “Thought Police” use surveillance and manipulation to maintain power. 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a trusted computer malfunctions in a malicious way. A.I. Artificial Intelligence, in which post-climate change humans create advanced robots capable of thoughts and emotion. Altered Carbon, in which human consciousness can be downloaded and installed in other bodies. Back to the Future, in which altering seemingly insignificant moments of the past results in big changes to the future. Battlestar Galactica, in which humans are struggling to survive after a battling robots in space. Black Mirror, in which unintended consequences of current technology play out in the near future.

WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR EMAILS NOW

Take control of your inbox and reputation with these smart tips

W BY PETER GASCA

ithout a doubt, I am not alone when I say that I send and receive a lot of email — and the

data backs me up. According to the Radicati Group, a technology research firm, in 2018 there will be “about 124.5 billion business emails sent and received each day,” in addition to another “111.1 billion consumer emails.” Overall, it is estimated that the average office worker receives approximately 121 emails per day. I would say that is a low estimate. With so many emails, it can be easy to get lazy with our compositions and responses. The problem is that once an email is sent, it is in the ether forever, so any errors, omissions or words you wish you could take back are out for public consumption. So, to assist others in the quest to improve our skills, here are some simple tips I have learned over the years that will instantly improve your email etiquette. 1 Avoid vague subject descriptions. The “subject” line is typically the first thing we will see when receiving an email. With hundreds of emails over a few hours, a vague or mysterious subject line gets you instantly filtered for consumption later — or deleted altogether. 2 Be sure to introduce yourself. Unless you are writing to a good friend or your parents, never assume that the recipient is going to remember who you are. Include a brief description of who you are and even how you met.

3 Introduce your topic. The same goes for the message. Introduce your topic and explain why you are writing. 4 Avoid overusing the “urgent” setting. A deadline change or lifeor-death emergency are acceptable reasons to mark a message “urgent.” Leftover food from the morning meeting in the break room is not. 5 Never attach large or questionable files. Although most of us have fairly fast internet access, not all of us have unlimited storage on our devices or computers. Never send large files that could easily be minimized. With that said, you should also avoid compressed “zip” files, which can land you on an unwanted spam list for security reasons. 6 Never include improper links. With the growing concern over cybersecurity and phishing scams, hyperlinks to unknown websites and masked URLs can put your recipient in a bad position. Be sure to check the security of a website before you send a link and be completely honest about why you are asking someone to visit a website. 7 Avoid asking for personal information. As a general rule, never ask anyone — regardless of how well you know them — to send personal information electronically. Instead, call the person and use the information capturing device popular when I was a kid — pencil and paper. 8 Use BCC with large distribution lists. When you send an email to numerous recipients, it is a good practice to address these individuals

in the blind carbon copy (BCC) part of the email. Doing otherwise exposes those emails to all recipients, which can hurt your reputation for protecting the privacy of others. 9 Use CC appropriately. In matters having to do with claiming credit, passing responsibility or airing dirty laundry, avoid including superiors or other unrelated parties to the conversation via the carbon copy (CC) or BCC. Just keep it to those with whom the issue matters. 10 Delete email trails. When you forward an email, the original email often is included in your message. Do this a couple of times, and you have a long trail and record of previous correspondences. While this can be helpful, it can also be disastrous, especially if it was received by a number of different people before you. 11 Avoid “date tag.” The best way to schedule an appointment is to give a few options, with speciﬁc days and times, in which you are available. The worse way to do so is with the question, “What works for you?” 12 Include a clear call to action (if one is needed). While some emails are meant to provide information, others are actually written with a goal in mind. Be explicit, clear and upfront about what you expect the recipient to do. Never use passive aggressive or cryptic means to try to make your point. 13 Let them have the last word. If the email you received does not ask for you to take action, for your opinion, or otherwise give you a reason to respond, then call Inc. it a day — for both of you.

Brave New World, in which human life is engineered in artificial wombs and drugs enable a “pain-free society.” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in which androids become indistinguishable from “real” humans and animals, and the defining characteristics of humanity are tested. Dune, in which consuming a rare spice allows humans to assume brainpower beyond advanced computers, at the expense of a planet’s natural resources. Ender’s Game, in which complex games turn children into real-life killers. Frankenstein, in which a scientist’s bioengineering experiment goes awry, and humans become more monstrous than actual monsters. Gattaca, in which genetics and reproductive technologies are used to determine employment opportunities. Her, in which a lonely human develops a romantic relationship with an AI operating system. I, Robot, in which Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are put to the test. Metropolis, in which a high-tech city depends on the labor of underground workers. Minority Report, in which mutant humans predict violent crime and law enforcement uses eye-scanning technology as surveillance. Paris in the Twentieth Century, in which “society places value only on business and technology.” Planet of the Apes, in which human intelligence atrophies due to overreliance on technology. Short Circuit, in which “an experimental military robot … is struck by lightning and gains a more human-like intelligence.” Star Trek, in which a crew of humans and aliens “have altruistic values, and must apply these ideals to difficult dilemmas” as they explore space. The Jetsons, in which cars fly and robots do most of the work, leaving humans to live a life of comfort (and comedy). The Matrix, in which humans are enslaved by sentient machines and experience life as a simulated reality. Tron, in which a tech exec is blackmailed by his own virtual intelligence software. WALL-E, in which pollution destroys the earth and humans retreat to space, where they become obese and weak “due to microgravity and reliance on an automated lifestyle.” WarGames, in which a computer simulation attempts to start a nuclear war. Westworld, in which humans live out their wildest fantasies in a theme park staffed by enslaved androids.

Quartz

HELLO: AMAZON’S ALEXA AT HOME IN NEW SUBDIVISIONS AND HOTELS BY MATT DAY

The Maple Valley home that Arnold and Armida Rosales bought came with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, several walk-in closets and Amazon’s Alexa. The couple were familiar with Apple’s Siri but had never used Amazon’s voice-activated software until they moved into a newly built home that came with it. “We really hadn’t thought about technology in the house,” Arnold Rosales said. They were pleasantly surprised. The emerging market for smart speakers, and the voice-activated software that makes them tick, is among the most ﬁercely contested battlegrounds in consumer technology today. Amazon intro-

duced Alexa in its Echo devices, the cylindrical pairing of speaker and powerful microphone array that ﬁrst went on sale in 2014. The device was a surprise hit, helping to popularize voice-controlled software in the home. Amazon now is trying to hold its advantage in the long term with a hiring spree targeting software engineers, speech and data scientists to build Alexa’s conversation skills, especially outside the home.

ALEXA NOW IN HOTEL ROOMS

David Berger had gotten into the Alexa business by accident. A semiprofessional Airbnb host, he was overwhelmed in early 2016 by a guest who asked a lot of questions. “Alexa could be answering these,” he said. “Not me.” To build software

that would do just that, Berger entered an Amazon hackathon, where Amazon’s developer-relations team quickly discovered what he was trying to do and offered the assistance of the company’s own engineers. Two years later, Berger’s company, Volara, builds software that about 40 hotels use to manage in-room guests. In-room devices are programmed to respond to common questions — what’s the Wi-Fi password, what good restaurants are nearby. When guests check out, Volara’s software resets the device to default settings for a new, anonymous guest. Andrew Arthurs, chief information officer for Two Roads Hospitality, a hotel chain, said the smart speakers give guests a convenient tool and save staff time answering basic questions that could be better spent elsewhere. “My understanding is Amazon didn’t see the opportunity in hospitality” at ﬁrst, he said. “Then all of a sudden it clicked, and they realized this is not just homes, but hundreds, or thousands, of hotel The Seattle Times rooms.”

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

SOCIAL MEDIA

Digital assets an essential part of estate planning If you haven’t discussed with your attorney, why? BY ELLIOT RAPHAELSON

ALL THE CLEVER WAYS

INSTAGRAM HAS CHANGED OUR LIVES Popular app has inspired many digital users to create and consume content

BY HANNA KOZLOWSKA

nstagram came into our lives nearly a decade ago. It didn’t barge in, it slowly crept, coloring our memories with its filters. But we soon realized it was taking over. It was changing how we perceive the world and even started shaping it. Today, you can find reams of articles that describe how it has transformed just about everything-from the obvious (like photography) to the very specific (eating rhubarb). Of course, the headlines often are dramatic, and there’s plenty of exaggeration. But in each case, there’s the nagging question of whether Instagram specifically posses a transformational power or are all our endlessly curated photos just a function of the always-on social media age? Still, it’s clear that the app, which is seen widely as the future of Facebook, its parent company, has had a massive influence on the daily lives of its 1 billion users. Whether that influence has been good or bad is another story. Instagram said last year that users under 25 spent an average of 32 minutes on the app per day. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of

things Instagram has changed, created or killed over the years, according to the internet: Photography. Both the amateur and the professional kind. It also helped fuel the rise of selﬁe culture. Food. From the humble pie and the aforementioned rhubarb, to all things rainbow. The British tradition of afternoon tea. Some say it has saved the custom. Drinking alcohol. A cocktail has to be shareable content. Restaurant décor. Even pubs have fallen victim to the tyranny of the app. Travel. Instagram determines the destination, and the hotel you book. Experiencing art. Traditional museums have learned to heed the Instagram crowd, for better or for worse, while new ones — ”museums,” often just in the name-pop up just to cater to it. Public spaces in general, including city streets and train stations. Perceiving nature. We’ve started to frame going outside as an “idealized aesthetic experience,” one scholar writes. Designing and marketing for clothes, shoes, lingerie, and jewelry. Also, shopping for them.

Fashion shows, where elaborate “moments” are manufactured with Instagram in mind. Selling books. “Bookstagram” helps literature go viral. Reading poetry. Grammable poems are likely contributing to a boost in the genre’s popularity. Journaling. Planners are no longer messy sanctuaries meant for the consumption of one person-they’re an Instagram art form. Lifestyle blogging. The app has all but killed its more wholesome predecessor. Fitness. Instagram promotes workout motivation to the point of dangerous obsession. Birth control. Instagram is making fertility apps look glamorous and aspirational. Therapy. Instagram life-coaches invite you into their lives, turning the concept of therapy upside-down. Memory. Research shows that snapping a photo means remembering less of the moment. Generally experiencing life. InstagramStories,whichletyoubroadcast themomentsofyourday,amplifymany oftheapp’seffects—boththe Quartz pleasantandtheharmful.

Most of you are aware of the need to make an estate plan to minimize the difficulty of conveying financial assets and physical property after death. But what about digital assets? These are the online accounts in your name that may include files such as images, photos, videos and text; email accounts; and social media and networking accounts. What happens to these when you die? If you don’t plan for the management of your digital assets after death, your family might not be able to access critical information they need from your online accounts. Because of federal privacy laws, most internet companies won’t be able to ensure that access unless you have taken specific steps beforehand. Few states have passed laws to solve this problem. In many states, some of your accounts may be deleted upon your death. In others, families must obtain a court order to obtain the rights to view a decedent’s account. The process can take years, during which time the account might be deleted because of inactivity. Some sites provide solutions. Facebook allows you to name a “legacy contact” — an individual who can post your obituary on your timeline. That individual can respond to new friend requests and update and archive your posts and photos. Google has an “inactive account manager” feature which allows you to identify “trusted contacts” with whom to share specific data available from your Google and Gmail accounts. Other sites have similar features, but they all require action on your part to activate them. The first critical step is to make an inventory of your digital assets — financial, purchasing and social accounts — and document how to access them after your death. List all online accounts for brokerage, insurance, banking, credit cards, loans, retirement savings, PayPal, purchasing, email and social media, as well as any blogs and personal websites. Include the usernames and passwords required to access them. The next step in your digital estate plan should be to develop a safe place to store this information. It can be with your estate attorney, in your safety deposit box or with an organization that provides storage for this information. There are several organizations that specialize as digital fiduciaries in this field, including Everplans, Final Roadmap, SecureSafe and others. Some states allow you to specify a “digital executor” in your will. If your state does not recognize a digital executor, you should discuss this issue with your estate attorney so that a similar function can be carried out in accordance with state law. Tribune Content Agency

PLUGGING IN SOCIALLY BOOSTS WELL-BEING Whether in-person or online, social interaction is inviting

Ron Schoenberger, right, socializes with his friend John Anderson, left, as they look over Schoenberger’s recently purchased Jaguar sports car in Spokane, Wash.

BY TREVA LIND

Ron Schoenberger has plugged into a network each week for 50 years. Since joining Rotary in 1968, the 83-year-old Spokane resident never missed a weekly group meeting. Club members recently honored his milestone. Based on research, Schoenberger’s regular social connections likely boosted his physical and psychological well-being, buffering against stress and loneliness. “You walk into room, and you have 50 people who know you,” he said. Schoenberger is a member of the Greater Spokane Valley Rotary Club after a merger with his initial group, Spokane East Rotary. He’s retired from the insurance industry. “I feel very young,” he said. “I’m just a happy person. Staying connected, sure, I think that does help.” Studies have found improved health and coping skills among people of any age who are socially engaged — whether it’s close relationships, online encounters or casual interactions. Social connections can be found through different channels, including family, work, church, hobbies or community centers. The internet opens up more ways of staying connected, through social media and websites like Meetup, Facebook, Twitter and others. Overall, it’s the quality of those interactions that matter, said Sarah Arpin, a Gonzaga University assistant professor of psychology. Her research focuses on social relationships, loneliness and health. Loneliness is a health risk factor, Arpin said. It is related to the onset of

Dan Pell/Tribune News Service

Social media use

A survey conducted in 2018 shows Facebook and YouTube dominate this landscape, as notable majorities of U.S. adults use each of these sites. YouTube

73%

Facebook

68%

Instagram

35% 29%

Pinterest Snapchat

27%

25%

Twitter

24%

22%

dementia and cognitive decline, cardiovascular issues, and even outranks obesity and smoking in leading to early death, she added. But while there’s some positive out-

come from simply being around other people, the real benefit occurs when interactions are supportive, Arpin added. “If you have quality relationships where you engage in meaningful interactions with other people, this really provides opportunity for them to provide support to you in times of need, and celebrate positive events,” Arpin said. “Having other people to share those times with and to cope with adversity is important.” Arpin suggests finding networks among people who share similar interests and values as one way to gain positive interactions. Volunteering can be another boost. “Volunteering can reduce feelings of loneliness because you’re interacting with other volunteers but also you might be finding meaning in offering support and helping others,” Tribune News Service Arpin said.

55 PLUS: SOCIAL CONNECTIONS THAT SPICE UP YOUR LIFE The headlines in the news have been particularly glum of late. Much more attention is being paid to the rising toll of suicide. While most attention is being paid to young folks who harm themselves, this fatal act is committed more often by seniors than by the young. “Seniors, many of them depressed, commit suicide at an alarming rate,” according to a recent report in the Washington Post. “White men 85 and older are more likely to commit suicide than Americans in any other age group — taking their lives at four times the rate of the general population.” The lifestyle changes which come with aging are one of the main reasons those 55 and older give up on life. Loneliness is a big factor. Consider this: a job provided interaction with others on a frequent basis. Often, those associations end with retirement. Few humans can be happy in social isolation. Before depression takes over and rules your life, start establishing a social network. An easy way to begin is by volunteering. The work of volunteering also can boost selfesteem, which is vital to preventing depression and thoughts of suicide. Also look for local groups and organizations based on your favorite interests or activities. This can range from discussion groups to wine tastings to fun evenings out for dining or going to a movie.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

SECURITY

CAN’T

HACK IT

Change the way you think about computer security

E BY SALLY ADEE

ven if you’re not a hacker or a coder, chances are you will have heard names like Stuxnet, NotPetya or WannaCry. After all, these malicious programs have made big waves in the past few years. First it was Iran’s nuclear centrifuges that were the target. Then Ukraine’s banks and hospitals in the UK. These cyberattacks keep coming. The standard response is to release software patches, the updates that pop up on our computers and smartphones. They are designed to seal up the holes through which hackers smuggle their malicious code. The trouble is there are more than 100,000 holes out there — and that’s just the ones we know about. “To successfully defend, you must ﬁnd all weaknesses and plug them,” said Linton Salmon, who runs a computer security program at the U.S. Department

Is your business at increased risk of identity theft? BY TODD MCKINNON

While targeting what you know has been a long-favored tactic of identity thieves, there’s no question that their methods are becoming more sophisticated. Take time to understand these threats to secure your employees’ identities — especially as more of them are using personal devices to handle work tasks. Here are four ways identity thieves are trying to track down your Inc. company’s sensitive information.

BIOMETRICS

A Japanese study found that hackers can lift ﬁngerprints from photos taken up to 10 feet away, giving thieves all they need to steal your identity. And it’s not just ﬁngerprints that hackers are going after. Apple’s Face ID was touted as “secure and private,” but a 10-year-old in New York recently found that, thanks to facial similarities, he could gain access to his mom’s phone.

BITCOIN

For as little as .049 bitcoins (roughly $500, depending on the day), hackers can be paid to inﬁltrate personal computers and hold personal documents, tax returns and photographs hostage until individual victims or large institutions pay up.

TEXTS

Hackers know the word is out on phishing. They’ve also begun to SMiSh (SMS phishing). The term refers to “Trojan horse” text messages hackers will send to phones. When links or attachments inside the messages are opened, identity-stealing software can proceed to wreak havoc.

WI-FI

Wi-Fi routers are still posing problems, too. Hacking Wi-Fi is a criminal act, but it’s actually not that difficult — even protected Wi-Fi networks are vulnerable to attacks. The problem with many of these hacks is that you don’t know how much information was exposed until it’s too late.

of Defense. “To successfully attack, you only need to ﬁnd one.” It’s a losing battle, and one we can no longer afford to ﬁght. If we are going to put computers in everything, it is time we souped up their defenses. That is what Salmon and a few others quietly have been working on. We can protect ourselves from cyberattacks, they say, not with ever more patches, but by overhauling the way we build microprocessors. When you strike a key or click an icon on a laptop, tablet or smartphone, that instruction must ultimately be carried out by the computer’s hardware, specifically the processor, which is usually a single microchip. The building blocks of the processor are transistors — minuscule electronic switches. But software can’t communicate directly with transistors. Software is based on words and symbols, whereas transistors understand only two commands: switch on or switch off. To help the software and hardware communicate, there are go-betweens called compilers that translate software instructions into machine code, a binary language of 1s and 0s, or ons and offs. How that translation works is determined by the chip’s architecture. This is

the set of rules embodied in the physical design of the processor that governs how the software gets access to the hardware. “Think of it like a contract that tells the software people what to expect from the hardware,” said Richard Grisenthwaite of Arm, the firm that makes processors for most smartphones. The rules vary slightly with the processor, but all architectures are similar. “A chip is fundamentally gullible,” Salmon said. “Give it any instruction you like, and it says: ‘Okay, let me do that as fast as I can! Does it make any sense? I don’t care, you asked me to do it. You’re the boss!’ It’s like a big, dumb golden retriever.” The unpleasant consequence is that when a hacker finds a sneaky way into a processor, it is only too happy to oblige any requests. That means it is possible to harvest sensitive data like usernames and passwords or get the processor to do nefarious deeds. The gold standard of hardware defense is formal verification, a way of using complicated algorithms to prove that the hardware does only what it should do. It requires rigorous checks to be made, which takes time. So far, it has only been used in custom-made chips for appli-

cations where human life is at stake, for example in flight control systems. That’s changing. ”I looked into formal methods a few years ago and was pretty disappointed,” said Ben Laurie, head of security at the Google-owned artificial intelligence firm DeepMind. “But then I looked into it again more recently and was surprised by the amount of progress.” Salmon is similarly confident. He said improvements to algorithms should make formal verification of hardware practicable by 2020. But hardware security is unlikely to end cyberattacks completely. “The ground is littered with the bodies of all the people who have ‘solved’ cybersecurity,” Salmon said. That’s partly because there will always be old systems in our computing infrastructure, not to mention attacks that rely on human gullibility: phishing, for example. That’s why it is good to think about a hardware overhaul, said Sarah Leeper, an engineer who has worked to build a commercial version of the inherently secure processor. “We need a chip that we can use the day after the catastrophe. If the change doesn’t happen before that day, it will happen after — New Scientist and it will happen fast.”

TOMORROW’S INTELLIGENT MALWARE MAY ATTACK WHEN IT SEES YOUR FACE

Sophisticated anti-virus tools can’t detect unknown code lying in wait for targets BY PATRICK TUCKER

You may think today’s malware is bad, but artificial intelligence may soon make malicious software nearly impossible to detect until the target sits in front of the screen. That’s according to recent work by a group of researchers with IBM. Here’s how the new smart spyware works and why it’s such a large potential threat. Traditional virus-catching software finds malicious code on your computer by matching it to a stored library of malware. Advanced defensive software creates virtual environments, called sandboxes, in which to open suspicious file payloads to see how they act. Now enter deep neural nets, or DNNs,

which defy easy probing and exploration even by advanced human analysts, much less by software. In sort of the same way that the inner works of the mind are a mystery, it’s nearly impossible to understand how neural networks actually work to produce the outputs that they do. The IBM researchers ﬁgured out a way to weaponize a layer where the network trains itself to do something with the input it received; and that presents a big new potential threat. “It’s going to be very difficult to ﬁgure out what it is targeting, when it will target, and the malicious code,” said Jiyong Jang, one of the researchers on the project.

That’s because the program needs a key to open it up, a series of values that matches an internal code. The IBM team decided to make the key a speciﬁc person’s face — or more precisely, the set of data generated by a facial-recognition algorithm. They concealed it in applications that don’t trigger a response from antivirus programs, applications like the ones that run the camera, for instance. With the camera under its control, the DNN sits quietly, waiting and watching for the right person. When that person’s face appears before the computer, the DNN uses the key to decrypt the malware and launch the Defense One attack.

How to ensure your phone apps aren’t spying on you

here have been some rumblings recently about smartphone apps using your phone’s microphone to collect data on your TV- and movie-watching choices. The New York Times wrote about software from a company called Alphonso that collects data to sell to advertisers. The apps in question are mostly games, but if you grant permission for those apps to use your phone’s microphone, JIM ROSSMAN they can listen to your life through the phone. The Alphonso software can hear audio tones embedded in our video content to identify what we are watching.

According to the article, Alphonso’s spokesman says they don’t record speech, but I’m guessing most of us do not want our privacy invaded by a game. So what can you do to protect yourself? Pay attention to what happens when you install a new app. Often they will ask you if you’d like to grant permission for the app to use your phone’s microphone. iOS apps will ask you during installation, while Android apps should ask the ﬁrst time they launch.

CHECK YOUR SETTINGS

You’ll want to make sure you know which apps are using your microphone. On iOS devices, you’ll open Settings, then open Privacy and then open Microphone. You’ll see a list of apps that you’ve given permission to use the microphone.

On Android 6 and newer, you’ll open Settings, then Apps. You’ll see a list of apps, but you’ll have to open each one and look for that app’s Permissions line to see what permissions you’ve given it. If you see an app using your microphone, touch the slider to turn off the app’s microphone access. If you decide to turn it on again, you can do so by going back to the Dallas Morning News same spot.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

SCIENCE

QUANTUM COMPUTING COULD PUT A STOP TO TRAFFIC JAMS With volume of drivers on rise, supercomputers can’t keep up on demand BY HOWARD RABINOWITZ

THE AMAZING WAYS COMPUTERS

‘predict the future’ With a little math, learn how to understand and implement algorithms

P BY DAN KOPF

redictive algorithms are everywhere. In an age when data are plentiful and computing power is mighty and cheap, data scientists increasingly take information on people, companies and markets — whether given willingly or harvested surreptitiously — and use it to guess the future. Algorithms predict what movie we might want to watch next, which stocks will increase in value and which advertisement we’re most likely to respond to on social media. Artificial-intelligence tools, like those used for self-driving cars, often rely on predictive algorithms for decision making. Perhaps the most important, and most personal, application of these algorithms will be in health care. Algorithm-driven AI has the potential to radically transform how we diagnose and treat health problems from depression and the flu to cancer and lung failure. That’s why, though they can seem impossibly opaque, they’re worth understanding. And in fact, in many cases, they are relatively easy to understand. The first step towards understanding the “random forest” — poetically named and one of data science’s most-loved prediction algorithms — is to understand decision trees. After all, what’s a forest if not a collection of trees? Decision trees are based on the idea that we can make predictions by asking sets of yes-or-no questions. Unlike other common prediction methods (such as statistical regression), decision trees mirror how people actually make guesses. This makes them comparatively easy to explain. The splits in a decision tree are designed to minimize incorrect guesses. Though it’s possible for a human to calculate the correct splits, data scientists almost always let a computer do it. The problem with decision trees is that you can’t make a good prediction with just one. You need to generate a bunch of different trees, and then take an average of the predictions from them all. This is where it gets a bit

complicated: If you’re working with one dataset, how can you make different trees out of it? Shouldn’t each tree be the same if you use the same data? This leads us to one of the key insights of modern machine learning. One dataset can actually be made into many different datasets through resampling — creating new datasets that randomly exclude some of the data. To understand why resampling is important, imagine you were trying to predict the average person’s height based on age, sex and income, and somehow professional basketball players LeBron James and Kevin Durant got into your sample of 100 people. A decision tree predicting height with these mega-rich basketball stars might erroneously lead to predictions that people who made more than $25 million a year were always tall. Resampling ensures that the ﬁnal analysis will include at least some decision trees where one or both of James and Durant are left out, and, therefore, provides a more realistic prediction. Once the forest is generated, researchers typically take the average of all the trees to get a probability for the outcome they are studying. The random forest is only one of the many prediction algorithms that statisticians and computer scientists have developed. In some cases, it’s the best. But in other contexts, other models might give better predictions. The most popular are support-vector machines and neural networks. Support-vector machines are useful when you have a lot of possible predictors, like when you are trying to predict the heritability of a disease based on genomic data. Neural-network algorithms tend to be very accurate, but are extremely slow to implement. These data models might seem obtuse and incomprehensible. They aren’t. If you have a little math acumen, you can learn how to understand and implement algorithms. The more people who learn these tools, the more likely we, as a society, are likely to apply them to a diverse set of problems, and not merely Quartz for commercial ends.

HOW VIRTUAL REALITY WILL DRIVE THE FUTURE In 1961, the first minicomputer, arrived at the MIT Electrical Engineering Department. It was a revolutionary machine, but as with all things that are truly new and different, no one really knew what to do with it. Lacking any better ideas, a few of the proto-hackers in residence decided to build a game. That’s how Spacewar! was born. Today, the creation of the Spacewar! is considered a seminal event in computer history. Because it was a game, it encouraged experimentation. Hackers try to figure out how to, say, add gravity or accurate constellations of stars and by doing so would push the capabilities of the machine and themselves. Tech investor Chris Dixon has said that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy. Yet it’s because so many technologies start out as toys that we are able to experiment with and improve them. As virtual reality becomes increasingly viable, this humanmachine co-evolution will only accelerate, because to create a new future we first have to imagine it. Today, we increasingly live in a simulation economy where we can test things out in a virtual world of bits and avoid much of the mess of failing in the real world. As computers have become more powerful and software algorithms have become much more sophisticated, the usage of simulations have expanded. When you can try out thousands of possibilities easily and cheaply, you are more likely to identify an optimal solution. “The advantage of virtual reality is that we can potentially replace [expensive training systems] with a VR system that costs hundreds of dollars and achieve the same or greater level of immersion,” said Pete Morrison, who helped develop virtual military training in the Australian army, which had commissioned a study of simulations. “That can be a huge cost saver for militaries worldwide and revolutionize how we train soldiers”.

SATELLITE IMAGERY + SOCIAL MEDIA = A NEW TOOL TO SPOT EMERGING NUCLEAR THREATS

BY PATRICK TUCKER

Hiding illicit nuclear programs might be getting harder, thanks to new ways of gleaning and combining clues from various rivers of digital data. That’s the conclusion of new research funded in part by the U.S. Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Satellites offer one kind of information; social media another — particularly inside countries that might be trying to ﬂout inspections. But large volumes of satellite imagery and social media data aren’t similar. You can have one analyst examine satellite pictures and another look at social media posts to see if they align, but the process is time-consuming and generally far from comprehensive. The study’s authors developed a method for fusing different types of data in a machine-readable way to offer a much clearer picture. “In light of their ubiquitous emergence, social media increasingly prom-

ise to be of great value even though associated applications have thus far remained simple, and their fusion with other data has been largely ad hoc,” the team from North Carolina State University wrote. Only by creating a new statistical method for fusing the outputs of satellite data and social media data do you get something you can use to predict what might happen next within a given area of interest, such as a specific nation’s nuclear enrichment or weapons development. The researchers looked at satellite and social media data from August 2013, when deadly floods killed eight people and caused widespread damage in Colorado. They sought to show that if you could algorithmically identify which imagery showed the flooding from space and which geotagged tweets described it on the ground, you could much more quickly verify one data set against an-

other — that is, you could determine whether incoming social media data supports the conclusions you might be reaching from your satellite data, and vice versa. “Next steps for the project include evaluating nuclear facilities in the West to identify common characteristics that may also be applicable to facilities in more isolated societies, such as North Korea,” noted a press release on the paper. One of the authors, NCSU computer and electrical engineering professor Hamid Krim, said the team would try to “to come up with systematic methodologies to transport knowledge about nuclear environments available in other areas (e.g., in the West) to these domains where there is very little available. Creating such an environment in these places of interest will help them detect potential undeDefense One sired activity.”

Traffic hell is alive and well in Los Angeles. In 2017, Angelenos were stuck on the road for 102 hours each, costing the city $19.2 billion, according to INRIX’s annual global traffic scorecard. Traffic is almost as badand costly-in Moscow, Sao Paulo and London. But this is the 21st century! you say. Can’t AI fix these problems by optimizing traffic flow? The answer is a little more complicated. Even the fastest supercomputers on Earth can’t currently calculate an optimal route in a human lifetime. That’s where quantum computers might have an advantage. Today’s computers are made up of on/off switches that correspond to the zeros and ones of digital logic, called “bits”. But quantum computers are filled with non-binary quantum bits, called “qubits”, that can exist as both a zero and one at the same time. By entangling a sufficiently large number of qubits together inside a quantum computer, they will be able to solve complex computational problems. This is what Marco Pistoia, a research staff member at IBM, calls the “quantum advantage.” “Traffic optimization using quantum computers, while still unproven, is the type of problem popular to speculate about,” Pistoia said. For example, instead of having to travel down each traffic route one by one, quantum algorithms could take advantage of the qubits’ computational properties to determine the best route. As Pistoia points out, today’s nascent quantum computers aren’t there yet and are initially being put toward applications such as chemistry and AI where it is clearer there will be a quantum advantage. Even though IBM and other companies have developed working quantum processors, these fullscale quantum systems, by most accounts, are at least a decade away. “We’re in this age now where quantum computers are quite small and quite noisy, so it’s tempting to think of them as bad systems, because they fail our abstract notions of what a computer is,” explained James Wootton, a quantum-error-correcting specialist at the University of Basel. “But in terms of experimental physics systems, they are huge and very clean. They are wonderful cutting-edge machines the likes of which we have never seen.” Consider Los Angeles’ traffic nightmare again. Since 2013, the city has boasted one of the world’s most sophisticated traffic systems, with 20,000 sensors over 469 square miles feeding data into a centralized supercomputer that adjusts the timing of 4,000-plus traffic lights in real time to maximize traffic flow. This system has reduced a five mile LA commute from 20 minutes to 17.5 minutes — saving a mere 180 seconds. The premise and promise of a quantum computer managing traffic flow is that, with the right algorithms, it could approximate the most-efficient futures of an LA rush hour and orchestrate routes that not just redirect cars and buses around a traffic jam but steer them home on routes that prevent the traffic jam from happening in the first place. Forward-thinking companies are already exploring quantum computing’s potential in this arena. Daimler AG, for example, is working on potential use cases, tackling complex problems such as vehicle routing for fleet logistics and autonomous cars. Self-driving cars could also play a huge role in improving traffic flow, Pistoia said, by automatically following the most optimized route, recalculating routes in real time based on updated traffic information, and eliminating irrational human decision-making. “It even happens to me where I don’t follow the best route,” Pistoia says. “Sometimes I won’t follow the route suggested by the app because I think I already know how to reach my destination, or I just follow my gut feeling that I know better than the computer. But the self-driving car will automatically take Quartz it and follow it.”

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

BEST REVIEWS

SIMPLIFY YOUR TECH SHOPPING WITH INSIGHT FROM OUR EXPERTS

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.

WHY TRUST BEST REVIEWS?

HOW WE DO IT

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.

BEST TVS The TV is the center of many households – where family members gather to spend time together and unwind. Whether your tastes veer toward obscure foreign ﬁlms or reality shows, a quality TV will help bring them to life. Now comes the hard part: which TV should you buy?

BEST OF THE BEST

BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

Samsung

Sony

Samsung

TCL

48-inch 1080p Smart LED TV

6” Class 4K (2160P) Smart LED TV

55-inch 4K Ultra HD Roku Smart LED TV

The overall build quality is outstanding, but several competitors offer more modern — and speedier — software.

Satisﬁed owners praise this TV’s performance and clarity, noting it’s a solid deal compared to similarly priced competitors.

No other smart TV offers such noteworthy HD resolution and well-rounded mix of features in this price range. Easily the best value for your money.

If you’re seeking affordability over great all-around quality, this unit is a good bet.

Distances itself from competitors with a wide variety of inputs and a bright LED backlight for enhanced visibility in low lighting.

Top-class performance. Stands out for its intuitive, user-friendly design and a crystal clear full HD resolution.

A great, affordable choice thanks to its enhanced motion clarity, even during high-speed action. Exceptional value.

We can’t get enough of this TV’s full-screen LED light distribution and its reliable WiFi connection.

Customers rave about this TV’s personalized home screen, which lets them easily select their favorite apps, channels and more.

Expensive, but if you are looking for the best picture quality, it’s well worth the investment.

Complaints of slow software and lagging sound quality are not uncommon.

The TV’s input options are quite limited, which some owners ﬁnd frustrating.

The accompanying stand is lightweight and ﬂimsy, and at least one customer had the TV tip over.

Reports of subpar sound and image quality, especially on certain settings.

BOTTOM LINE

From its exceptional motion clarity to wider viewing angles, this Samsung smart TV is clearly the best choice right now.

PROS

665-inch 4K Ultra HD Smart OLED TV

CONS

75” Class 4K (2160P) Smart QLED TV

TV FEATURES TO CONSIDER Resolution The resolution of a TV refers to the number of pixels it displays. The more pixels a TV can display, the higher the resolution and the sharper the picture. Most TVs sold today have either HD or UHD resolution.

Let’s find out what those mean. HD TVs have a resolution of either 1920 x 1080p or 1280 x 720p (often expressed as 1080p and 720p, respectively). The former still are quite common today, but 720p sets are quickly becoming outdated, because the picture quality isn’t as good as that on higher-definition models. UHD TVs (4K) have a resolution of 3840 x 2160p. The benefit of UHD TVs is that smaller objects appear sharper even on very large screens, and the overall picture is more clear and lifelike. Size From compact 20-inch models to 85-inch behemoths, TVs come in a wide range of sizes. We’d recommend considering a range of factors when deciding what size TV you require, including what room you intend to place it in, the size of the room, the distance

from which you’ll be viewing the TV, and how often you’ll be watching it. Screen size: If you’re buying a main TV for the living room, you’ll probably want a larger screen than you would if you were buying for the bedroom or another room where it will get less use. Room size: The size of the room is also an important factor. A giant TV can swamp a compact room, drawing attention away from the décor and any interesting design features. Viewing distance: It’s recommended that the distance you sit away from the screen be about three times the height a standard high-deﬁnition (HD) TV and around one and a half times the height of an ultra-high-deﬁnition (UHD) TV. If your chosen TV is too large for the room, you won’t have enough space to position your seating the right distance from the screen. TV size: We’d also recommend that you think about how much you’ll watch the TV in general. If you only watch a few hours a week, it might not be worth splurging on a huge set. HDR High dynamic range (HDR) is a feature that many UHD TVs offer. Essen-

tially, it means that a TV set can deliver more levels of contrast, more colors and increased brightness, offering a far superior picture quality. The trouble is that there isn’t a single standard for HDR at present. Some TVs are compatible with a type of HDR known as “Ultra HD Premium,” while others are compatible with Dolby Vision HDR or Technicolor Advanced HDR. Dolby Vision seems to be the market leader right now (and arguably the most impressive to look at), so it makes sense to opt for a Dolby Vision-compatible TV, but this could change in the future. Smart features In the past, smart TVs were in a category all their own, but today the vast majority of new TVs have a range of smart features. Most are WiFi compatible and can link straight to your favorite streaming services, such as Netﬂix, Hulu and Prime Video. Some newer models also are compatible with Alexa or Google Home, so you can use voice commands to switch them on, change channels, set a recording schedule and so on.

EXPERT TIP

TIPS

Think about what kind of connection ports you need on your TV. If you opt for a 4K TV, make sure its ports support HDMI 2.0, which will allow it to accommodate other Ultra HD sources in the future. Make sure your chosen spot is big enough for your TV. If it might be a tight squeeze, measure the space before ordering a set, and remember to look at the full dimensions of the set and not just the screen measurement. There are several inches of frame to factor in, too. Pick a TV that’s easy to use. TVs are getting more complex, but a smart TV interface should help, not hinder, you. If you feel like you need to take an in-depth training course to ﬁnd the app you want, look for a model that’s easier to use. Consider where the wires will go. Wires running in and out of your TV can end up looking very messy, especially if you have a range of connected devices, such as a Bluray player and game console. Some TVs have special channels for the wires to keep things looking tidy.

Even high-end TVs tend to have inconsistent sound quality. If sound matters to you, consider buying a soundbar with your new set. Esther | Technology, Product Review Researcher

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

BEST REVIEWS

BEST COMPUTER LAPTOPS Some people prefer to use smartphones. But for many of us, nothing quite beats typing on a keyboard. What’s more, a lot of us prefer the large screen of a laptop. Shopping for a great laptop requires understanding some computer jargon.

BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

BEST OF THE BEST

Apple

Acer

Dell

Samsung

Microsoft

Surface Pro 4

2018 Flagship Pro Convertible 2-in-1 Chromebook

BOTTOM LINE

2018 Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Flagship

A newer version of a solid laptop that is known for longevity. A great option for work and professional use thanks to its responsiveness, apps and impressive visuals.

A “light-duty” laptop with some standard laptop features. An inexpensive route to internet access.

Though larger and bulkier than some laptop users like, this wellmade, updated model is a reliable option and a good choice for Dell fans.

A mid-priced Chromebook that offers excellent graphics, speedy processor and easy-to-carry compact size.

A device that blends the features of a tablet and a laptop in one modern, portable package.

PROS

Chromebook, 11.6 inch

A revamped model of a top-seller with key features that include a lighter and slimmer build, sharp Retina display, fast Intel Core i7, 16GB storage, superior graphic performance and exceptional HD video quality.

Lightweight and portable. Price falls on the low end of the spectrum, making it ideal for anyone who wants a basic laptop for work and internet surfing.

A 2018 Dell with responsive HD touchscreen, backlit keyboard, 8th gen Intel Quad Core processor and vivid sound and graphics. Spacious 8GB memory, 15.6” screen, and Bluetooth capability. Perfect for work and play.

A new Samsung Chromebook that offers a sleek, 12.3” size, Intel Core m3 processor, and LED backlight. Touchscreen is responsive; Bluetooth connectivity.

Weighs less than two pounds. Responsive touchscreen. Great for light personal use.

CONS

15 inch MacBook Pro Laptop

Some defective models and occasional static in the speakers have been reported. Fairly pricey, but also a top model among professionals.

Offerings/features largely limited to the scoop of Google Chrome. Not for gamers.

Some issues with the touchpad being unresponsive. Doesn’t have a Type-C USA port. Build is somewhat bulky.

Limited to Google Chrome. Only has 4GB internal memory, but can accommodate 64GB flash memory when needed.

Pre-installed features eat 27GB of RAM (64GB total.) Can run only three apps at a time.

LAPTOP COMPONENTS TO KNOW Before purchasing a laptop, you need to speak the language of computers. By understanding the components included inside the machine, you’ll be able to pick a laptop that truly meets your needs.

yield much faster performance for the laptop. RAM of 2GB to 4GB provides basic performance levels for the laptop. Higher-end performance requires 16GB of memory or more.

Processors The processor performs the computing work of the laptop. Higher-end processors cost more, but they work faster with better multitasking performance. Intel Core brand and AMD FX brand processors are the best for gaming and high-end processing. Intel Celeron and AMD F series processors are less-expensive units. Gaming machines will include a separate graph-

Battery life Batteries provide the power to run the laptop when you’re away from an electrical outlet. The best laptop battery runs for 9 to 12 hours. Lower-end batteries run for 4 to 6 hours. Memory Also called RAM (random access memory), higher amounts of memory

ics processor from NVIDIA or AMD, which provides top-end gaming performance. Storage Laptops will use either a hard disk drive (HDD), a solid state drive (SDD) or a hybrid drive that uses both technologies. An HDD drive works slower than an SSD drive, but it also costs quite a bit less. Screen resolution If you want to watch movies on your laptop, you’ll want full HD or Ultra HD resolution. Such screens cost quite a bit more than below-HD resolution screens.

Screen size Manufacturers measure screen size diagonally. A small laptop screen measures around 12 inches, while the largest laptops are 17 inches or more. Touch screen Some laptops offer a two-in-one construction, meaning they are a mix between a tablet and a laptop. You can fold the laptop down ﬂat with the screen facing upward to make it work like a touchscreen tablet. You’ll pay quite a bit for a two-in-one laptop, but it may ﬁt your usage patterns well.

BEST BLUETOOTH SPEAKERS Cassette tapes, CDs and bulky speaker systems have lost their luster. The digital format reigns, and wireless Bluetooth speakers are becoming the most popular way to amplify your playlists. Bluetooth speakers make a wireless connection with a smartphone.

BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

BEST OF THE BEST

Bose

Ultimate Ears

CONS

PROS

BOTTOM LINE

SoundLink Revolve

Boom Brainfreeze

Cambridge Soundworks OontZ Angle

JLB

Amazon

Pulse

Echo

Bose’s latest bluetooth speaker option that easily beats out the competition.

A compact design by a trusted brand, but slightly edged out by the Bose’s superb sound.

Quality and features don’t quite stack up to costlier models.

A good option if the light show appeals to you. Otherwise, consider others on our shortlist.

If you like the Alexa personal assistant service, it’s an excellent choice that’s much more than just a speaker.

A streamlined model with rugged construction. Has rich, deep base and will play for 12 hours per charge. The best sound you can get in a speaker this size.

Unbeatable features and sound quality. Waterproof and shockproof construction and 360-degree rich sound puts it at the top of the pack.

Clear sound, solid construction, and lightweight design at budget-friendly price. Connects in seconds up to 33 feet from your device.

A splash-proof speaker with noise canceling capabilities for easy-to-hear phone calls. We love its LED light show, which pulses along to your favorite tunes.

Internet connectivity and voice-enabled functions separate it from the other models. Alexa service is a nice bonus, and the actual speakers deliver solid sound quality, as well.

Bluetooth connection isn’t always automatic. Sounds better the further you sit from it — not great sound for listening right next to you.

The battery life is slightly shorter than that of the Bose, but considering sound quality, you might not mind.

The sound is not quite as rich as that of more costly speakers.

The 10-hour battery life is reduced to 5 hours when the light show function is in use.

If you don’t need the voice-enabled functions, this may be overkill.

TYPES OF BLUETOOTH SPEAKERS Most Bluetooth speakers ﬁt into one of four design categories. Think about how you’ll use the speaker before picking the best design for you. Indoor/home Bluetooth speakers Indoor Bluetooth speakers offer better sound quality than portable speakers. Large, high-quality indoor speakers can approach the audio quality of traditional wired speakers. Some indoor Bluetooth speakers run from battery power or an AC adapter. For a Bluetooth speaker you’ll use primarily at home and indoors, an AC adapter works great. The battery option allows you to take the speaker outdoors if you want. Unless the speaker speciﬁcally carries a rating for weather protection, only use indoor speakers outdoors on a dry day.

Outdoor Bluetooth speakers If you want to take your Bluetooth speaker to a picnic or poolside, look for a unit rated to work outdoors. Such speakers will offer water- or weather-resistant capabilities to protect them from the elements. Some outdoor speakers are large enough to deliver high-volume sound while still providing good battery life. Outdoor speakers sport a rugged design, too, which allows you to toss a speaker into a bag and carry it anywhere.

Portable Bluetooth speakers Portable Bluetooth speakers are extremely small. As such, they don’t deliver top-end audio quality. They especially tend to struggle with loud bass

sounds. However, they’re great for walking or biking while listening to music if you don’t want to use headphones. If you want a portable unit that also delivers good audio quality, consider an outdoor-rated Bluetooth speaker. It will probably be too large to clip onto a backpack, but it will fit inside a backpack and stand up to rugged treatment during a hike or bike ride. Specialty Bluetooth speakers Some Bluetooth speakers have a specific task incorporated into their design. For example, some shower heads come with tiny Bluetooth speakers that fit into them. If you want to connect multiple Bluetooth speakers to one source, you’ll need a speaker with this particular feature built into it.

TIPS

Many Bluetooth speakers include a battery that can power other devices. This means the speaker can charge your smartphone while you’re on the go. A Bluetooth speaker has a maximum connection range of about 33 feet. A WiFi speaker has a maximum connection range of about 125 feet. Some speakers can make use of both WiFi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity options. Bluetooth speakers designed to be used at home use an AC adapter that plugs into a wall outlet. Portable Bluetooth speakers run from a battery for onthe-go power. Some speakers offer both battery and plug-in options.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

BEST REVIEWS

BEST DIGITAL CAMERAS Smartphone cameras have upped their game, but if you’re really into photography, you need a dedicated camera. A digital camera makes it easy to produce crisp, clear pictures every time.

BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

BEST OF THE BEST

Panasonic

Nikon

CONS

PROS

BOTTOM LINE

LUMIX 4K

24.2 MP Digital SLR

Sony

Nikon

Canon

20.2 MP Exmor CMOS Sensor Digital

Coolpix L330

Powershot SX420, 42x optical zoom

Once you get used to this camera, it is hands down the best on the market.

Takes nice pictures in most instances, but you might be disappointed with the quality of long-range shots.

A powerful yet compact camera that produces exceptional photos and video. Though the battery needs frequent charging, you likely will by pleased with the results.

Image quality isn’t the highest caliber, but it’s an excellent choice for the money.

A great all-rounder from a reputable company. Not the most recent tech, but definitely the best deal.

Shoots 4K video. Exceptional zoom returns crisp, clear shots with its 25mm to 600mm lens.

Takes professional-quality photos and videos yet is easy for amateurs to master. Compact and easy to carry.

Small, portable point-and- shoot that produces vivid, highly detailed images. Has an impressively bright Carl Zeiss lends, just like the expensive DSLR models.

Lightweight and portable, yet it offers the performance of an upperlevel camera.

Versatile. Excellent optical zoom and wide-angle lens. Dedicated button for 720p movies.

1200mm lens has an initial learning curve and can return blurry shots.

Zoom feature is a bit lacking; it doesn’t focus in on distant objects well as expected considering the price.

Battery has the tendency to drain even when not frequently used. Shutter response sometimes is unreliable.

Slower shutter speed creates a lag during action shots. Occasional blurry images.

Poor instructions/lack of software can make the initial learning frustrating. Battery life isn’t great.

TYPES OF DIGITAL CAMERAS Point-and-shoot cameras Point-and-shoot digital cameras, also known as digital compact cameras, are the easiest type of camera to use. Using automatic mode, you simply point the camera at your desired object and take a photo. However, you’re not able to make many adjustments with point-andshoot cameras, such as changes to the aperture or shutter speed settings. A point-and-shoot camera usually is small enough to ﬁt in your bag or pocket. It’s an ideal option for beginners or casual photographers. Price: You can expect to pay between $80 and $1,000 for a point-and-shoot digital camera. Expect to pay up to $200 for a camera with 12 or fewer megapixels, a one-inch or smaller sensor and just a few special features usually cost between.

Bridge/super-zoom cameras Bridge cameras, also known as super-zoom digital cameras, are similar to point-and-shoot cameras in some ways, but they are semi-automatic. This means you can make changes to the exposure settings. Bridge cameras usually have a manual mode, too, which allows you to have complete control over the settings. The lens offers a much longer zoom range than point-and-shoot cameras, but it cannot be changed. Price: You can expect to pay between $175 and $550 for a bridge/super-zoom digital camera. For somewhere between $375 and $550, you can get one with a sensor larger than one inch and lots of other special features. For somewhere between $375 and $550, you can get one with a sensor larger than one inch.

DSLR cameras The versatile digital single-lens reﬂex (DSLR) camera is an advanced digital option. These cameras are fairly bulky, especially compared to point-and-shoot cameras. There is a manual mode that allows you to customize settings like shutter speed or aperture, as well as an automatic mode for easy shooting. You can change the lens on a DSLR camera based on situation or setting. DSLR cameras feature a large image sensor for higher-quality images. Price: You can expect to pay between $500 and $3,500 for a DSLR camera. Cameras with 12 or fewer megapixels, a sensor smaller than one inch usually cost between $500 and $1,000. The priciest DSLRs run between $2,000 and $3,500 and offer 20 or more megapixels.

Mirrorless ILCs A mirrorless interchangeable lens camera (ILC), or compact system camera, is similar to a DSLR camera. You can use it in manual, automatic or semi-automatic modes, and you can change the lens based on where and what you’re shooting. These cameras have fairly large image sensors for high-quality photos. Mirrorless ILCs are much smaller than DSLR cameras. That’s because the mirrorless ILC doesn’t contain an optical viewﬁnder with an internal mirror like the DSLR camera does. Instead, the mirrorless cameras have an electronic viewﬁnder or LCD screen that enables you to see what you’re shooting. Price: You can expect to pay between $400 and $1,500 for a mirrorless interchangeable lens digital camera.

BEST COMPUTER MONITORS A monitor is one of the most important components of any setup. You’ll probably use your monitor every day, so it’s worth it to spend time picking out the right one. Selecting a monitor is a careful balancing act between your ideal screen size, resolution, feature set and cost.

BEST BANG FOR THE BUCK

BEST OF THE BEST

Acer

ASUS

Acer

R240HY bidx 23.8-Inch IPS Widescreen Monitor

32MA68HY-P 32-Inch IPS Monitor

VS228H-P 21.5” Full HD Back-lit LED Monitor

GN246HL Bbid 24-Inch 3D Gaming Display

This sharp, anti-glare display keeps even the most nitpicky monitor users happy, and the added LD features make this a great pick for gamers too.

A vivid, easy-on-the-eyes display at an attractive size and price point makes this monitor a good choice, but some users may be frustrated by its limited mounting options.

A super-bright, large monitor that is great for gaming, but its resolution may not work well for detailoriented tasks like reading.

A great budget-priced monitor for everyday use, though dedicated gamers may want to look for a monitor with a faster refresh rate.

Gaming enthusiasts will find this a great entry point for higher-end, fast-refresh monitors, though it may need a little calibration.

Sharp display with highly accurate color. Adjustable stand pleases users. Matte screen is easy on the eyes, and backlight doesn’t bleed through. Power light can be disabled if necessary.

Sturdy, stable monitor base. Bright, vivid color display and great contrast, with long-lasting performance. Monitor can stand up to frequent moving around. Anti-glare screen is easy on the eyes, and fast refresh rate makes it good for gaming.

Wider monitor provides more screen real estate without appearing fuzzy. Bright. Good color accuracy, once adjusted. Works very well for gaming.

Relatively lightweight and easy to set up. Clean, vibrant color that calibrates accurately. Quick switch modes are a plus for users.

Fast 144 Hz refresh rate is great for competitive gaming. Premiumquality color and sharpness and a very bright, pleasing display.

Expensive. Some issues with connecting more than one monitor.

HDMI cable must be purchased separately. Backlight bleeding at corners (common in IPS displays) bothers some users. Some reports of “dead pixel” issue on first use. Can’t be wall mounted. Monitor controls are unmarked.

Glossy and highly reflective, bothering many users. Almost too bright; some users turned down the brightness. Mounting screws aren’t standard size. Resolution is somewhat low for detail work like reading or drawing.

Bluish hue significantly affects some units. Warranty replacement was unsatisfactory for some. Refresh rate is too slow for many games.

Monitor stand’s height can’t be adjusted, and it takes strength to tilt the stand angle. Calibration menus are a bit confusing. Some ghosting occurs during gameplay.

CONS

PROS

BOTTOM LINE

27UD68-W 27-Inch 4K UHD IPS Monitor

FINDING A RESOLUTION

Computer monitors come in a variety of resolutions — that is, the number of pixels they can display, expressed as height by width — with a current maximum of 3840x2160, otherwise known as 4K. And while more pixels means more detail, picking the best screen resolution for yourself may be trickier than expected, because high-resolution screens can make text smaller and harder to read, depending on the size of the screen. It’s also important to avoid confusing screen resolution with screen size: a 24-inch monitor with 4K resolution will make text seem tiny and hard to read, while a 32-inch monitor with only 1920x1080 resolution might make images

and text seem painfully blurry. Thankfully, there are a variety of both screen resolutions and screen sizes, so there’s a perfect monitor for everyone. The most common resolutions for computer monitors are 1920x1080 (also known as Full High Deﬁnition or UXGA), 2560x1440 (WQXGA), and 3840x2160 (also known as 4K, or UHD). Ports, ports, ports When buying a new monitor, it’s important to be aware of what ports you need. There are three primary ways to connect a computer to a monitor, and not all monitors support every connection type. The three types are:

HDMI: High-Deﬁnition Multimedia Interface, or HDMI for short, is the standard of digital video connection ports and cables. HDMI cables are inexpensive and can transport both audio and video simultaneously. DISPLAYPORT: DisplayPort, a video-only competitor to HDMI, connects digital video signals to monitors, and is most commonly found on Apple computers. DisplayPort cables can be used to daisy-chain monitors. VGA: VGA is the analog video standard still required by older computers. While VGA lacks the crisp digital accuracy of HDMI or DisplayPort, it’s still a perfectly competent connection type.

TIPS

If you need extra USB ports in your computer set-up, look for a monitor with a built-in USB hub. Some monitors include as many as four additional USB ports tucked away out of sight. If you’re not sure what screen size to buy, use a tape measure to estimate your available and ideal screen space on your desk. Remember that monitor screen measurements reflect the diagonal distance between opposite corners. When first setting up a monitor, use the on-board calibration settings to adjust your screen image. Proper configuration based on the included instructions can significantly improve your monitor’s overall image quality.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

E-COMMERCE

What is going on with

APPLE?

CEO Tim Cook has expanded existing products, and challenged the focus for the company

BY MIKE MURPHY

he commonly held belief is that Apple charges ridiculously high prices for its products because they’re well-built, beautiful objects that the company generally stands behind. As founder Steve Jobs loved to say, Apple’s products “just work.” By and large, they still do. Apple recently became the ﬁrst trillion-dollar U.S. company, and sells tens of millions of iPhones, iPads, computers and other gadgets each year at premium prices. But it feels as though there’s a creeping undercurrent of discontent among its customers as quality control and customer service seem to be slipping from their previous heights. In roughly the last year, there have been more than a few troubling instances that make you wonder what exactly is going on with Apple. Here’s a quick refresher on everything that’s happened recently:

MACBOOK KEYBOARDS STOP WORKING

Apple launched a new MacBook design in 2015 with a new keyboard design that was meant to cut down on the space keys take up. The keys have been criticized for their shallow, clacky design that seemed to easily break. Users have reported that things like pieces of

dust seem to have been enough to break one of the keys. In June, Apple admitted fault and said it would cover the cost of replacing keyboards for four years.

DELAYED PRODUCTS

Apple is traditionally very quiet about products it’s working on, but recently it’s started to show off devices a little ahead of when they’re ready to hit the shelves. The company struggled to deliver a few products it’s previewed on time: AIRPODS. Initially announced in September 2016 for an October release, the wireless headphones hit stores in a limited capacity in December, with most shipping after the Christmas shopping season. Most consumers weren’t able to pick them up until 2017. AIRPOWER. Apple announced its novel wireless-charging system alongside the iPhone X in September 2017. The company was vague on when it would be released, saying to “look for AirPower charger next year.” In their recent product launch event, the AirPower was a no-show.

THROTTLING PHONES AND BATTERY REPLACEMENT PLANS

Late last year, research found that Apple was surreptitiously slowing down iPhones as their batteries aged. Apple said this was to preserve the batteries as long as possible. However, since it was done without the user’s knowledge, many saw the practice as conﬁrmation of the long-held rumors

that Apple slows down old phones when it releases new ones to convince people to upgrade. Class-action lawsuits swiftly followed, and Apple apologized. It lowered the price of its battery replacement service for anyone with an iPhone 6 or newer from $79 to $29 through the end of 2018. In March, the company introduced software to give users more control over how their phone managed its power.

A NEW APPLE?

All of this isn’t to say that there haven’t always been issues along the way. Steve Jobs once told someone to hold their phone differently when their brand-new iPhone 4 wouldn’t make calls; Apple once recalled 1.8 million defective laptop batteries; and the iPhone 5 seemed to have its own swelling-battery problem. Yes, some of these recent reports are anecdotal complaints ampliﬁed by social media. And when you’ve sold as many products as Apple, there are bound to be the occasional quality control blip along the supply chain. But it feels as if something has gone pearshaped at Apple recently. Perhaps this is just an awkward blip in Apple’s long history — but it’s possible that it signals that something deeper may be wrong at the world’s largest company. How long can the company keep expanding from its core before Quartz more serious ﬂaws emerge?

Apple’s App Store Turns 10. What’s Next? BY ALEX MOAZED

In July, Apple celebrated the 10th anniversary of the App Store, one of the strongest, most proﬁtable platforms that has propelled Apple to become a monopoly. When the iPhone ﬁrst launched in 2007, there were only a handful of key apps like Safari, Phone, Text Messages, Mail and Google Maps. Surprisingly, Steve Jobs initially was resistant to the idea of an App Store. With multiple staff members urging him to consider it, Steve got on board and the App Store officially launched in July 2008.

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2018. Marcio Jose Sanchez/ Associated Press

WHAT’S NEXT?

With all this success, do the next ten years look brighter? Or, can Apple not keep up? Apple’s new App Store iterations already are in the works. Apple has been the leader in making a push for Augmented Reality apps. Siri still needs some improvement, but Apple can also pursue voice controlled apps. The car has been a stumbling point for Apple, but there are a lot of app store opportunities in that industry as well. As for the original App Store, growth

will continue and Apple predicts its gross margin to improve as App Store revenue and other services revenue increases. The proﬁtability driven by the App Store is what excites many analysts as overall revenue growth starts to level off over the next few years. Over the longer term, Apple also recognizes that every 10-20 years there is another large technology upheaval. Just like the evolution from the desktop computer to the phone, the next big leap

in consumer technology will present either an opportunity or a threat for Apple’s dominant role to continue. Microsoft, for example, hasn’t been as lucky in the most recent cycle from computers to phones and tablets despite making tens of billions of dollars in investments. The fact that platforms have winner-take-all dynamics is what makes Apple’s App Store so dominant and profitable and Microsoft’s efforts to Inc. unseat iOS or Android futile.

WANT A NEW IPHONE? DON’T FEEL CONFUSED BY THE LINEUP The ultimate guide when considering a new phone BY DWIGHT SILVERMAN

The three iPhones that Apple unveiled recently come with the “S” designation in their names, which traditionally indicate the devices are incremental updates to the company’s vaunted smartphone. But in 2018, that’s only partly true. Yes, the iPhones XS, XS Max and XR look like last year’s groundbreaking iPhone X — no home button, gesture-based navigation, face recognition and a bezel-free display. Nevertheless, the three models represent a shift in the way Apple aligns its phones with the types of people who buy them, and that’s creating some confusion. There is the update you’d expect to last year’s iPhone X. The iPhone XS has the same 5.8-inch screen that uses OLED technology for a more realistic display. As is always the case, it’s powered by a faster processor called the A12 Bionic. And it has an improved camera that can compensate for shooting into the sun and allows you adjust the background blur in Portrait Mode photos. Not available last year was a larger-screen version of the iPhone X. That’s been rectified in 2018 with the iPhone XS Max. It has been described as Apple’s biggest iPhone ever. So if you are a fan of big phones, it might seem that your choice is pretty clear cut, right? Not really. That’s because there’s also the iPhone XR. It’s larger than the XS but smaller than the XS Max, with a 6.1-inch screen. It’s also significantly less expensive. The XR is Apple’s wild card this year, and in a way it’s a response to complaints about the iPhone X’s $999 price tag. It takes aim at people who want most of the technology but at less of a financial blow. With these factors in mind, how do you decide? If you’re not interested in a larger iPhone, then the XS is your clear choice — assuming you’re willing to pay the $999 starting price. If you like a smaller phone, are willing to consider something slightly larger, and want to save money, the XR starts at $749. If you’re a fan of Apple’s Plus line, and you’ve got the cash, the XS Max is the clear pick, starting at $1,099 — making it Apple’s priciest iPhone. But if you don’t want to pay that much, you still can get a bigger screen Houston Chronicle in the iPhone XR.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

E-COMMERCE

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN SHOPPING Overall, consumers tend to have a favorable view of retail innovations. Roughly half of respondents who have tried a technology said it ultimately improved their shopping experience. Have you heard of this technology? Have you personally tried this technology while shopping either in stores or online (among aware)? Did it improve you shopping experience (among those who have tried the technology)?

29%

3D printing

22% 47%

TRENDY, SMARTER WAYS TO SUCCESSFULLY

SHOP ONLINE

29%

Making a purchase through social media

56% 45% 28%

In-app store navigation

54% 63%

In-store digital display

25% 57%

Don’t be left wondering if you can make the outﬁt look as good as it did at the store

BY ARAMIDE ESUBI

ocial media has had a huge impact on how we shop for our clothes. One minute you could be scrolling through your Instagram feed or ﬂicking through the digital copy of your favorite fashion magazine and the next, with one simple tap, you could be ordering one of the items that caught your eye. It is simply that easy to purchase clothing these days. But while it is wonderful to have so much choice and it is liberating to be able to shop wherever you are, it’s a risky business. Many of us aren’t getting it right, and we are losing money (and conﬁdence) in the process. I purchase most of my wardrobe online and have done so for some time now. Of course, the best part is I can do it from the comfort of my couch. So if you’re looking for some guidance on shopping online like a pro, look no further. I’ll list the pros and cons to online shopping and share some tips to getting it right.

THE PROS OF ONLINE SHOPPING

As I mentioned above: It’s easy! With just a few clicks you can have your shopping done in mere minutes.

Retailers sometimes offer web exclusives, which are items and discounts that are available only to the online shopper.

Clothes often are showcased on a person rather than hanging limply on a hanger. Some retailers have videos of models strutting their stuff in the clothing, which give us a more realistic view of the item.

You can read other buyers’ reviews so we can learn if the ﬁt runs true to

size, how it washes and how it looks and feels in comparison to what it looks like on the screen.

You often will receive suggestions for other items you might like or items that are similar to those you’ve purchased. While I know this can be annoying, it also can be a great way to discover new items.

HOW TO SHOP ONLINE SUCCESSFULLY

Know your fabrics. As you’re unable to feel the item, it helps to have a basic understanding of different fabrics: how they look and feel, and how they wear.

Make sure you read the buyer reviews, if there are any. It’s a fantastic way to truly ﬁnd out what the item is like from shoppers just like you.

Get to know what the sizing is like in your favorite stores; some will run true to size, while others will run smaller or larger than average.

Look for the size guide. Almost all online retailers have a size guide to help you choose the right size for you. It helps to take your measurements so you’ll know exactly what bracket you fall in; this will be a game changer for you. Yet, sizing can still be hard to gauge. To help, I also suggest purchasing items in two sizes to try. Then you can just send back what doesn’t work.

Look online for coupon codes before hitting “Pay now.” I often have found discounts for free shipping or 10 percent off. Take a look at the retailers’ social media accounts, which is where they almost always share Tribune Content Agency current discounts

SELLING ONLINE: HOW TO DECIDE The last two years have been a learning process starting and running my own e-commerce store. Every day I receive messages from friends or internet strangers asking “How can I start a store?” and “What platforms should I use to get started?” To make your search easier, I’ve compared three of the most popular e-commerce platforms that I use: ETSY is an online marketplace specializing in handmade, originally designed, vintage items and craft supplies. Its focus on a few select product categories means users likely are to be interested in what you’re selling. It has a suite of marketing tools that make it easy to create coupon codes and other promotions for your customers. But as its popularity has skyrocketed, Etsy’s market has become more and more saturated. There’s an abundance of sellers with similar products, which means more competition. AMAZON is the biggest store in the world, which gives you access to millions of customers every day. Amazon listings also tend to show up on the top of Google searches. Unlike Etsy, you’ll need to buy custom UPC codes for each item that you’re selling. SHOPIFY allows you to create a fully-customized e-commerce website with your own domain name. It’s a great choice if you want to have your own online brand and storefront for your products. — Arianna O’Dell, Inc.

50% Retailer messaging apps

24% 65% 52%

Online visual search

21% 56% 51%

Online voice search

16% 43% 55%

Augmented reality

16% 48% 53%

Virtual tailor tools

15% 47% 54%

Virtual reality

14% 47% 50%

Smart or interactive dressing rooms

13% 46% 49%

The high value of data vs. your privacy BY IAN BOGOST

A barista gets burned at work, buys ﬁrst-aid cream at Target, and later that day sees a Facebook ad for the same product. In another store, someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage. These are just some of the many discomforting coincidences that make today’s consumers feel surveilled and violated. But none of this is new, nor is it unique to big tech. Online services are only accelerating the reach and impact of data-intelligence practices that stretch back decades. They have collected your personal data from employers, public records, purchases, banking activity, educational history and hundreds more sources. They have connected it, recombined it, bought it and sold it, and the processed data is spat back at you to beneﬁt sellers, advertisers and the brokers who service them. The age of privacy nihilism is here, and it’s time to face the dark hollow of its pervasive void. Tech companies do collect data in unexpected and sometimes duplicitous ways. Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica catastrophe offers one example. More recently, a report based on research at Vanderbilt University suggests that Google collects or infers vast quantities of information about its users based on their web browsing, media use, location, purchases and more. Revelations like these have spawned a

class-action lawsuit against the company, and it’s tempting to imagine that oversight, regulation or legal repercussions might eventually discourage or even change the way tech companies collect and manage data. But it also ignores the fact that Google and Facebook’s data hunger takes place within the context of a widespread, decades-old practice of data intelligence. For years, companies slurped up, bought and sold that data to hone their marketing and sales efforts. With the rise of big tech firms, the stakes changed. Data brokering now has become mainstream. The term “business intelligence” first was coined in 1865 in Richard Miller Devens’s book Cyclopaedia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes. Devens studied the ability of merchants and bankers since the 17th century to benefit from access to information (about war, competition, weather and so on). Almost a century later in 1958, the IBM engineer Hans Peter Luhn rekindled the concept for the information age. By then, machines like the ones IBM manufactured had made business intelligence easier, but Luhn identified acquiring and storing data was only a start. It also had to be retrieved and acted upon. The most important advance in the process came in 1969, when the computer scientist Edgar F. Codd, also working at IBM, developed a new paradigm for data storage and processing. Codd’s “relational model” was soon realized in

software products, known as relational databases. These made it easy to run “queries” against large, diverse data sets. The individual actions of particular customers could be aggregated into patterns. And it could all be done quickly using updated information. Almost every important enterprise-software program of the next decade was built atop the idea of a relational database. For a long time, that information was scattered all over the place. A supermarket chain might know how well a speciﬁc product line sold in a particular region, but it didn’t know much about who bought it or why. Then organizations found ways

to acquire and recombine information of all kinds. The rise of credit cards, debit cards and electronic-payment systems made it easier to collect sales information and to connect multiple purchases to specific customers. Data brokers also started collecting and selling specific types of data, like lists of sales prospects for particular categories of goods. Companies could purchase these lists, install them on their local enterprise systems, and then correlate the new, outside data with information they already possessed. All together, these factors shook privacy’s foundation, and they did it long before Google and Facebook. The real difference between the old and the new ages of data-intelligence-driven consumer marketing is that lots of people finally are aware that it is taking place. But limiting the information you give to Facebook and Google could help only somewhat. You can’t forego the supermarket or the drug store, where every purchase is stored and linked to every other. There is no escaping the machinery of actual life. The opponent in the data-privacy invasion is not a comic-book enemy of fixed form, one that can be cornered, compromised and defeated. Instead it’s a hazy murk, a chilling, Lovecraftian murmur that can’t be seen. Your data is everywhere — and nowhere — and you cannot esThe Atlantic Online cape it.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

GADGETS/TECH

SIX WAYS TO

STREAMLINE

YOUR ONLINE LIFE — OR SAVE MONEY Drowning in the proverbial technology pool? Here’s a cheat sheet to manage your accounts

KIPLINGER’S PERSONAL FINANCE

oes your internet service move at a crawl? Do you ﬁnd it difficult to remember all your online passwords? Here are ways to solve those and other problems and possibly save money, too.

GET FREE TV WITH YOUR WIRELESS PLAN

Now that its merger with Time Warner is complete, AT&T is offering two unlimited wireless plans that include free access to more than 30 channels of live TV, including CNN, TBS and AMC, as well as 15,000 shows and movies on demand. Customers with other wireless plans can pay for the service, called WatchTV, for $15 a month, which makes it the cheapest

streaming service available. Sign up online or call AT&T (800-331-0500).

SPEED UP YOUR SEARCHES

If web pages load at a crawl and videos keep buffering, measure your internet connection’s download and upload speeds at speedtest.net. If you aren’t getting the speed you pay for, contact your service provider to troubleshoot the connection. While you’re on the line, ask whether you qualify for any promotional deals.

MANAGE PASSWORDS

End the frustrating cycle of resetting forgotten passwords — and foil ID thieves — by setting up a password manager, such as LastPass. The service will help you create strong, unique passwords for each account, then store them behind a single, ultra-secure master password. When you’re browsing the web, LastPass

will automatically fill in your credentials. The service’s free version works across multiple devices, but the premium offering ($24 a year) adds multifactor authentication and 1 gigabyte of encrypted storage.

CLEAN UP YOUR ONLINE FOOTPRINT

Sign into accounts that you no longer use (check old e-mail messages to jog your memory), then visit AccountKiller.com and Backgroundchecks.org/justdeleteme for instructions on how to remove accounts from popular sites, including AOL, Facebook, HotMail and MySpace.

BACK UP DIGITAL PHOTOS

To protect your photos and videos from hackers, a virus, a technical glitch or other mishap, redundancy is key. Keep photos on your phone or PC if you’d like, but store backup copies

BE INSPIRED TO SAVE ON TECHNOLOGY A quick and easy guide to embrace low-cost gadgets and digital services

BY KAITLIN PITSKER

Technology doesn’t have to be expensive. Here are three ways to save money on electronics, cloud storage and streaming movies and music.

REFURBISHED AND OPEN-BOX DEALS

Save up to 50 percent on small appliances and electronics by buying certified refurbished items through manufacturers or authorized dealers. Returned or overstock items often are inspected, serviced, tested and repackaged, then sold at a discount with warranties of 90 days to a year. You’ll find the biggest savings on older models, but you can save about 30 percent on current-generation items. Your safest bet is to buy directly from the manufacturer, according to DealNews.com, a bargain-hunting website. You may not get the lowest price, but you’ll have the security of a manufacturer-backed warranty. Also worth checking out: Amazon, Crutchfield,

eBay or Newegg. Best Buy Outlet sells clearance, openbox, refurbished and preowned items at BestBuy.com and at outlet and warehouse locations. Open-box appliances typically are up to half off list price, and you can get refurbished tech products — including smartphones, smart watches and smart speakers — for up to 30 percent off.

LOW-COST CLOUD STORAGE

Free and cheap cloud storage widely is available, but Google Drive stands out for its 15GB of free storage for users who have a Google account. Drive can serve as a storage shed for your files or for backing up your device, but it’s also a workbench, allowing you to edit documents, spreadsheets and other files on the go and share them with others. If you want more space — say, to store large files or back up your computer’s hard drive — Google Drive still is a deal. For example, 1TB of space costs $10 a month. Apple users should consider

iCloud Drive. You’ll get 5GB of free storage, and a 2TB storage plan costs $10 a month and can be shared with your family.

NO-STRINGS STREAMING

Fees for cable and streaming subscription services can add up. But many public libraries are branching out, partnering with streaming and other digital media services to offer library-card holders free access to tons of movies, TV shows, music and e-books. For example, Kanopy.com partners with more than 4,000 libraries and features more than 30,000 ﬁlms. Its selection focuses on indie ﬂicks and educational titles rather than blockbuster productions, but unlike most other free streaming services, Kanopy doesn’t show ads. And Hoopla (www.hoopladigital.com) offers patrons of more than 1,500 libraries free access, without ads, to movies, music, audiobooks, e-books and televiKiplinger’s Personal Finance sion shows.

on an external hard drive or “gold” quality CDs — as well as in the cloud with a service such as Google Drive or iCloud Drive. If you use your smartphone to snap pictures that you don’t want to lose, check your phone’s settings to make sure you’ve scheduled automatic cloud backups that include your images.

STOP RENTING YOUR ROUTER AND MODEM

Instead of spending $10 to $15 a month to rent an all-in-one modem and router from your internet service provider, buy your own setup. You’ll generally spend $100 to $200 and recoup the cost in one to two years. Look for a combination modem and router that’s on your provider’s list of approved devices (usually on its website). After setting up your new device, contact your internet provider and ask how to Your Money return the items.

TECH Q&A: HOW TO MAKE ONLINE STORAGE SIMPLER Q: My PC has two OneDrive online storage accounts that I’d like to combine and access with a single password. Can I combine them? — Marc Burton, Minneapolis A: Microsoft won’t let you combine a personal OneDrive account with one obtained through an Office 365 subscription. But there are ways to work around that. One is to set up OneDrive so that you can simultaneously view your two online storage accounts with a single password. To do that, open OneDrive using one of your e-mail addresses, then add the second e-mail address. But you may not find that method attractive because you’ll still have to manage the unique storage limits. Another alternative is to quit using your personal account, and instead transfer all of its files to the Office 365 account. Your combined files are unlikely to exceed the 100-gigabyte capacity.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

GADGETS/TECH

TECH REVIEW

SAMSUNG GALAXY NOTE 9 Is it new? Sort of. Improved? You bet

BY JIM ROSSMAN

I’ve always loved the concept and the execution of Samsung’s Galaxy Note phones. Samsung already had its ﬂagship Galaxy S phones, which were great, but the Note kicked things up a notch. The Galaxy S phones had big screens, but the Note always seemed to have a bigger screen, a bigger battery, a faster processor, more storage — and a higher price. Oh, and it had the S Pen stylus.

WHO PICKS THE NOTE?

There are two types of people who use Galaxy Note phones: those who want to use the stylus and those who just want a really big, top-of-the-line phone. It’s the ﬂagship phone on steroids. Samsung has always been be a bit ahead of Apple when it comes to handset design. Before the iPhone X, the Galaxy S 8’s screen went from edge to edge and close to the top and bottom of the phone’s face. This year, the Galaxy S 9 took its design cues from the S 8 and updated everything. Likewise with the Note 9: It doesn’t look much different from the Note 8, but everything is a step up. There are only so many design changes you can make to a smartphone. Samsung’s and Apple’s handsets look pretty similar for a reason — they work. Now that we have a design that’s becoming standardized (full screen, no front button), it’s natural to make improvements under the hood. We all gravitate to the familiar, and we all love to own the latest and greatest. The Note 9 is both (and the most expensive).

SPECS

I love a phone that has it all. The Galaxy Note 9 is built around a beautiful 6.4-inch Amoled screen with a resolution of 1,440 by 2,960 pixels. The screen is made of Corning Gorilla Glass 5, and it’s HDR10 compliant. It’s about as big and bad as phones get these days. A note: Out of the box, the resolution for the Note 9 is 1,080 by 2,220 pixels. If you want to see the screen in all its glory, go to the display settings and change the resolution. You’ll use more battery life, but oh, is it worth it. The phone has an always-on screen that uses very little power to keep the time, date and other notifications on the screen, even when the phone is sleeping. It runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 with configurations up to 8 gigabytes of RAM and 512 Gb of internal storage. It has a microSD card slot for up to 512 Gb of additional storage. The main camera features dual 12-megapixel sensors, one with a 26mm lens and one with a 52mm lens. The selfie camera has an 8 MP sensor. The Note 9 can also charge wirelessly. Speaking of charging, the Note 9 has a 4,000 milliamp-hour battery, which is the largest I’ve seen on a phone. To unlock the phone, the Note 9 can use an iris scanner or a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor that’s located under the main camera lens. That’s an improvement, but it’s still a little too close to the lenses for me to keep my big fingers off the lenses when I try to press my finger to the sensor. I will say that Samsung has the easiest fingerprint learning system. Simply swipe your finger on the button from top to bottom two times and your fingerprint is captured. It’s brilliant.

STYLUS AND OTHER FEATURES

The hallmark of the Note line of phones has always been the stylus, called the S Pen. The pen can be used exactly as you’d expect to write on the screen for taking notes or marking up images. You can also use it as you would a ﬁnger to select and launch apps and for more accurate input on menus and small buttons. This year’s S Pen has a button that can act like a tiny remote control to snap photos, advance slides or jump to the next song on a playlist. The Note 9 also has a feature called DeX that lets you plug the phone into a computer monitor with a USB-C to HDMI adapter and use it with a trackpad and keyboard like a mini desktop computer.

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

Samsung is proud of the Galaxy Note 9. There are two conﬁgurations _ 128 Gb of storage with 6 Gb of RAM for $1,000 or 512 Gb and 8 Gb of RAM for $1,250. These prices are close to the iPhone X, which has two conﬁgurations at $999 and $1,149 but half the storage of the Note 9 and no The Dallas Morning News microSD slot.

DIGITAL WALLET SERVICES GAIN RISING ACCEPTANCE Explore the brave, new world of virtual money in banking, shopping

T BY GEORGE AVALOS

ech giants’ cardless payment services — including Apple Pay, Android Pay from Google and Samsung Pay — aim to ease the path to the truly digital wallet, and researchers project huge growth in adoption by retailers and consumers. Even staid financial giants such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America are behind a push to encourage and enable customers to access ATMs without their debit cards. Yet the digital wallet business has gotten off to a rough start, said Bay Area-based analyst Trip Chowdhry, managing director with Global Equities Research. “There have been many false starts in this industry,” Chowdhry said. “The current payment methods are intrusive, and they are not seamless.” Even so, cardless payment services are here to stay. “Mobile proximity payments, enabled though near-field-communications, are projected to vastly increase to $118 billion in 2018, up from $3.5 billion in 2014,” according to a report by Statista, a web-based data and statistics company. “Some of the benefits of mobile payments include the speed of payment, the convenience as well as the integration with pre-existing loyalty and coupon programs.” These benefits point to a brave new world of virtual wallets. The most common mobile-payment activities include paying bills through a mobile phone or web browser, buying items or digital content remotely with a phone, and paying for goods in a store with a phone, according to the Federal Reserve Bank in a report

titled “Consumers and Mobile Financial Services 2016.” As of December 2016, Apple Pay led the way in North American retailers’ adoption of mobile-payment systems, with 36 percent acceptance, according to Statista. PayPal had 34 percent acceptance, Mastercard PayPass had 25 percent, Android Pay had 24 percent, Visa CheckOut had 20 percent and Samsung Pay had 18 percent, the report said. One of the next steps, analysts say, is to make payments seamless for the consumer, and to make it easy for shoppers to pick up items in stores without lining up at check stands. This sort of convenience already is available in a different industry that new technologies have disrupted. “Uber and Lyft enable users to simply get out of the car at the end of the journey, while the app seamlessly processes the fare in the background,” technology company Rambus noted in a report. The technology providers also need to overcome consumers’ worries about security. Campbell-based market researcher Creative Strategies recently studied digital wallets to assess barriers to greater adoption of the services. “We found that fears about security, trusting in the apps, are the primary concerns,” said Ben Bajarin, a principal analyst. “Consumers don’t quite buy the story that they are secure. They are concerned that anything in a digital form can be stolen.” Bajarin said Apple, Android and Samsung mobile payment technologies all encrypt users’ information, securing their credit card details. “Compared to a physical credit card or physical wallet that can be stolen, digital wallets are secure,” he said.

Here is a brief look at some of the technology leaders in mobile payments.

APPLE PAY

Apple Pay is a free digital wallet and mobile payment service that can be used to make in-person payments and is compatible with an array of contact-less terminals. The system is live in 15 countries, including the United States, Canada and several other European and Asian countries.

ANDROID PAY

Google developed this platform to power tap-to-pay purchases on mobile devices so customers can make payments with Android-based phones, tablets or watches. Android Pay uses the near-ﬁeld communications technology to exchange bank card information so funds can be transferred to the retailer.

SAMSUNG PAY

Samsung Pay uses near-ﬁeld communication technology and supports more than 500 banks and credit unions, which together represent more than 85 percent of the U.S. debit card and credit card market.

WELLS FARGO

Instead of a physical card, customers can now use a mobile Wells Fargo app to choose cardfree ATM access and then obtain a one-time token for that session to conduct transactions at the machine.

BANK OF AMERICA

Bank of America focuses on digital wallets for its card-less ATM services. They deployed card-less technologies by accepting all digital wallets, including Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Mercury News Android Pay.

A good keyboard is the ultimate luxury Treat yourself to a better personal and productive experience while at work BY DAVE GERSHGORN

Every weekday I walk to the desk that was assigned to me, sit down on the chair an office manager chose and open the computer issued by the IT department. Nearly everyone in my office has the exact same setup. But the one thing that’s mine — the item I interact with more than anything else — is my keyboard. Most of us don’t think much about our computer keyboards, but they can be a deeply personal and customized tool, one that can make you feel at home in the office while contributing to your productivity. Every part of a mechanical keyboard can be customized — the switches beneath every key dictate the feel of typing on the keyboard, a new set of keycaps can change its style completely. Some keyboards can even be programmed to automate repetitive tasks.

I have two keyboards, one for work and one at home, but I keep my favorite at the office since that’s where I do most of my typing. I use a Vortex Poker 3 with Cherry MX Blue switches. Cherry is the most wellknown manufacturer of mechanical keyboard switches. Each color switch gives a different tactile feel when pressed. The Blue switches on my keyboard give a little bump when they’re pressed, which I like. I’ve also cycled through a few different sets of keycaps on the keyboard, but I like mine because they’re purple and they include a key that

looks like a bowl of ramen. My preferences aren’t just cosmetic. My office keyboard is set up to help me work. I’ve programmed it to help with everything from ﬁling stories to transcribing interviews. My caps-lock key has been replaced with a function key, so I can use my pinky to press it and then use the WASD keys as arrow keys to navigate, the Q and E buttons to control the laptop’s volume, the Z, X, and C buttons to pause and jump a few seconds back or forward on the software I use to transcribe, and the F button to mute the computer. To copy a headline and URL of a story to ﬁle it to my editor, I just press the function key and the Y key. It’s the little things that get us through the day, right? Mattress salesmen will tell you that you spend a third of your life sleeping, so you should spend a little extra on a good mattress. I say the same goes for keyboards. If you work in an office, you’ll spend another third of your life using a keyboard, so why not interact with something that suits Quartz your preferences?

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

ENTERTAINMENT

CORD-CUTTING

CONUNDRUM

Don’t sit the bench — here are the best ways to watch pro sports online without cable

BY SEUNG LEE

t’s Sunday morning and you’re already on the couch with a cup of coffee (or a can of beer) ready to watch, say, the 49ers or Raiders on TV. Maybe you stick around after the football games to see the Giants, A’s, Sharks or Warriors play in the afternoon. For many sports fans, it’s a weekend ritual that has helped make broadcast and cable television a smashing success. But now, more than ever before, fans are turning to the internet to get their live sports ﬁx on their computers, tablets or

opened up new opportunities.” With so many options — free, paid, legal and not-so-legal — available on the internet, watching sports at home without cable has never been easier or more intimidating. The landscape looks like the Wild West, as old legacy networks, subscription-based streaming services, social media platforms, sports leagues, venture capital-backed startups and ragtag illegal stream providers all ﬁght for the eyes of viewers. None of the online mediums have fully supplanted the quality, quantity and consistency that cable television provides. Despite hemorrhaging subscribers, there’s a reason

smartphones. A growing number of Americans are leapfrogging over cable television bundles that, according to Leichtman Research Group, cost an average of $103 a month in 2016. And sports-focused television networks have felt the cord-cutting pinch: ESPN lost 2.9 million subscribers in one year, according to a May 2017 report from Nielsen. “People purchased cable to watch ESPN,” said Travis Vogan, an assistant professor of mass communications at the University of Iowa, specializing in sports cable television. “They were not happy about this but they had no alternatives in the past. But streaming technology has

more than 86 million households still subscribe to ESPN as their go-to channel for live sports, along with the millions who watch CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX. Here’s a look at some of the top ways to watch live sports streaming without cable for the Big 4 sports leagues: National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association and National Hockey League.

LEAGUE-PROVIDED STREAMING SERVICES

Rather than relying on cable networks as middlemen, sports leagues now broadcast games directly to their fans.

STREAMING WARS ACCELERATE: WHAT’S WORKING AND WHY Video delivered outside of traditional TV gets a boost BY DIANE GARRETT

We won’t know the true impact of Apple, Disney and Walmart’s entrance into the booming subscription video streaming market for at least a year. And we may never be able to fully pinpoint the role of cable cord-cutting in driving the market’s growth. But we can more confidently assess what is working now and why. Hollywood has its eye on the business for a simple reason: The financial stakes are huge. The Boston Consulting Group recently forecast that $30 billion in profits could shift away from the traditional TV business over a five-year period ending in 2022, with streaming services poised to pocket some of the spoils. With this much at stake, showbiz players are now making big plays for “over-the-top” services. “We’re in a phase of accelerating growth,” said Tony Goncalves, a speaker at the summit and CEO of AT&T-owned Otter Media, home to subscription OTT services such as anime-centric Crunchyroll. Beyond existing direct-to-consumer businesses, emerging services like Disney are on pace for scale, he added. “New ideas pop up every day.” Parks Associates, a Dallas-area research outfit, tracks more than 200 OTT services and there are plenty more beyond those, pointed out analyst Hunter Sappington. “With so many services it is hard for some to gain an audience,” he said. “Even niche services can get lost.”

By far the best way to stand out, experts agree, is through exclusive content. And the bigger the competition, the more services are willing to pay to produce it. That’s why Netﬂix, Hulu and company have been spending billions on content, and players-in-waiting such as Apple have been developing marquee projects with the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and Steven Spielberg. CBS is building new programming out of it its broadcast TV and library offerings for its All Access service. It spun “The Good Fight” off from Emmy-winning “The Good Wife” as its debut original programming some 18 months ago, and followed that with a new “Star Trek” series. More “Star Trek” programming and Jordan Peele’s reboot of “The Twilight Zone” are in the works. Its latest, “One Dollar,” tracks a dollar bill in connection to a Rust Belt murder and employs a storytelling style more in keeping with a premium cable show, according to Marc DeBevoise, president and COO of CBS Interactive. “We’re playing a different game here,” he said. “We’re taking a No. 1 network and building a premium service on top of it.” CBS All Access now has 2.5 million subscribers, and by year’s end, will boast seven original productions. According to DeBevoise, the service is on track to double its subscriber base this year, having already upped its original projections to forecast 8 million subscribers by 2022. “We’re feeling very competitive,” he said. “This isn’t a winner-take-all market.”

Streaming subscriptions by age 2017 80%

2018 71%

68%

64%

37%

29%

20 0 Ages 14-20

21-34

35-51

52-70

71+

Indeed, while Netﬂix is the clear subscription leader in this market with 56 million in the U.S., consumers are proving to be increasingly willing to pay for multiple OTT services. According to Parks Associates, more than a quarter of all millennials subscribe to three or more OTT services and more than half subscribe to at least two. Overall, 17 percent of U.S. broadband subscribers have three or more OTT subscriptions and 69 percent have at least one. There’s room for niche players — as long as they don’t target too broad a genre, as NBCUniversal did with its now-shuttered Seeso comedy service. Otter Media has 2 million paying sub-

scribers for its game, fantasy and anime fan-centric services, building a sense of community through events and merchandise. “We’ve deﬁned a really interesting swim lane,” Goncalves said. “We want to be everything to somebody.” And Viacom has found great synergy between its Nickelodeon cable TV brand and Noggin, a streaming service targeting preschoolers. “One of the reasons I am excited about the emerging OTT space is it provides choice to consumers not only in content but how they want to consume it,” said Tom Gorke, Viacom exec VP of distribution and business Reed Business Information development.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

ENTERTAINMENT

“FOR MOST CORD-CUTTING MILLENNIALS, FREE STREAMS ARE VERY POPULAR.” Ethan Tussey, assistant professor of communications at Georgia State University

Each of the Big 4 sports leagues has its own online streaming service which range from $100 to $200 over the course of a regular season. MLB and NHL have MLB. TV and NHL.tv respectively. NBA has the League Pass. NFL has the Game Pass, which only show replays of regular season games, and the RedZone channel, which live-broadcasts only scoring plays and highlights from Sunday games. “Sports leagues understand themselves to be media producers these days,” said Victoria Johnson, an assistant professor of ﬁlm and media studies at UC Irvine. But there are caveats. Postseason play largely is not included. (MLB.TV, for example, provides select postseason games but never World Series games.) And more importantly, games for local teams are blacked out from online streams because of arcane rules designed to keep you tuned into cable. It is possible to watch local games on online, but you will have to sign in using your cable subscription information. But recently, online-only subscription streaming services have been providing an alternative.

SUBSCRIPTION ONLINE STREAMING SERVICES

Smaller, more ﬂexible services like Sling TV, Hulu, YouTube TV and fuboTV have been vying to become the internet’s AT&T or Comcast when it comes to sports. Ranging from $20 to $50 a month, they provide a leaner-than-cable channel selection, which includes the ﬁve major sports channels — but rarely all in one package. For the sports nut, fuboTV is the most dedicated model available. While priced highest at $50 a month, its premier subscription includes a whopping 69 sports channels — but not ESPN. For the budget conscious sports fan, Sling TV is your best bet, but it limits consumer choices like fuboTV. Its $20-per-month Orange plan only includes ESPN channels, and its $25-per-month Blue plan includes FOX, NBC and NFL Network but not ESPN. (CBS is not included in either plan.) Hulu and YouTube TV have the most well-rounded channel selection of them all and are

priced at $40 and $35 per month, respectively.

TECH GIANTS

For those wary of paying for another subscription, social media powerhouses Facebook and Twitter are beginning to broadcast games for free. Facebook and Twitter have been broadcasting one MLB game every Friday and Tuesday, respectively. In addition, Amazon streams Thursday Night Football games for Prime customers. Despite the convenience at no charge, one game a week on a platform is hardly enough for the vast majority of fans. But expect the number of games to grow. The tech companies are interested in

SOME TOP WAYS TO WATCH LIVE SPORTS WITHOUT CABLE MLB.TV Pros: High-deﬁnition quality for out-of-market games, great user experience on tablets, able to switch feeds for home and away teams, $113 for the longest regular season among Big 4 sports Cons: Local teams are blacked out, no postseason games Sling TV Pros: A-la carte-cable subscription, cheapest paid package starting at $20 Cons: Its two main bundles split ESPN-related channels and others, does not carry CBS fuboTV Pros: Premier subscription carries a whopping 69 sports cable channels Cons: Most expensive among online streaming subscriptions at $50, no ESPN Reddit Pros: Free streams, unlimited range of sports, organically congregated communities in subreddits Cons: Illegal, often choppy quality, certain streams carry malware and viruses

live sports because it guarantees a set number of people using their platforms for at least the duration of the game, according to Vogan. But will Facebook ever replace ESPN? It’s unlikely. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has expressed only tepid interest in live sports, saying paying billions of dollars for exclusive broadcasting rights is not part of Facebook’s long-term goal, according to Bloomberg.

THE BLACK MARKET

It’s impossible to talk about alternate ways to view live sports without mentioning the flourishing black market. “For most cord-cutting millennials, free streams are very popular,” said Ethan Tussey, assistant professor of communications at Georgia State University who studies sports media in the digital age. Due to its recent growth and largely discreet nature, there is little academic research on black market streaming. One British study in April found 54 percent of millennials watched illegal streams for live sports, compared to only 4 percent of those over 35, according to The Guardian. One popular forum in which streamers and viewers share sports stream with each other is Reddit. Two separate subreddits, or in-site communities, dedicated to live streaming Big 4 sports have around 100,000 subscribers each. Before and during every game, several streams are uploaded to Reddit. Sometimes, they are taken down by league moderators looking for pirate streams. While most are direct copies of a television stream at a lesser, choppier quality, some stream at high-definition quality with no commercials. Many serial streamers ask for donations to keep the stream going. Vogan compared these streamers to descramblers, who would split wires to receive cable for free. Vogan said the legacy players like ESPN know these communities exist and see them as a “lost cause.” Rather than cracking down, they have diverted their efforts to wooing them back with better convenience, quality and reliability. “If you want to see something and it’s televised, you can probably find it,” Vogan Mercury News said.

The secret to Amazon’s product launches Entertainment products build on familiar commands BY HEATHER WILDE

Recently, I started taking part in an experiment. I began the process of adding voice controls to my home. As part of this, one phrase started to become commonplace: “Alexa, turn on the TV.” These same ﬁve words can be heard in houses around the world at least once a day. They’re words that help people segue into using something that is, at its core, extremely complex and technologically advanced. And yet, what I realize as I listen to those words is that they also are cleverly meant to connect with us. When I was younger, not only did we not have internet, cell phones or even personal computers in most homes — our televisions didn’t have remote controls. A common phrase heard was “[insert name of child], turn on the TV.” This was followed up by asking the same person to change the channel (often one at a time), to change the volume up and down (often multiple times), and then to go turn on or off the lights. As I’ve been experimenting more with Alexa, I can’t help but think about “her” as that young child. Jennifer Prenner, global head of marketing, growth and engagement at Amazon Fire TV, offered a similar take on the new Fire TV Cube with Alexa. “We wanted to take everything that was great about the Echo, including Alexa, and make it even better with visuals from a FireTV,” she said.

And, as a visual version of an Echo, it certainly is an upgrade. “Our goal is to give people an open ecosystem where they can have the type of entertainment they want, on their own terms,” Prenner said. In my experiments, though, I’ve had some hiccups getting the Fire TV Cube to open thirdparty apps like Netﬂix or HBO over the Amazon Prime app, and it won’t turn my television off, no matter how politely I ask. Interestingly, as I asked Alexa to pause Netﬂix, she told me of new commands added in an update that I could now utilize. This made me realize something — like the young child changing the television — Alexa is growing up and learning along the way. Knowing the right time to set your child — I mean, product — out into the world is an important choice. Here’s a few guidelines to help you out:

CONSUMERS ARE ASKING FOR IT. It may seem obvious, but the ﬁrst step in releasing any product is to have some sort of consumer base to release it to. If you have gotten into the unenviable position of developing a product with no built-in customers, then you will have a long road ahead to try

to convince them that they need it. Instead, try building on something that is familiar. With the iPhone, Steve Jobs took an MP3 player, a computer, a camera and a cell phone and combined them into one unit to give people something they’d purchase.

THE PRODUCT IS DONE-ISH.

While we all wish it weren’t the case, most products do not work correctly 100 percent of the time. In early releases, products have a higher percentage of failure as early bugs are being worked out of the system. Research indicates that customers are willing to put up with a few glitches, especially in technology. There’s nothing worse than ﬁnally releasing your product after working on it for months (or years) to the resounding silence of the internet’s indifference. Instead, prior to launch you need to spend some serious effort letting people know you exist and building up a targeted userbase. Like all young children, Alexa has a lot of growing up still to do. By opening up the ecosystem for development and giving users the reigns, Amazon is giving us a chance to grow with Inc. her.

Before you cut the cord, let’s talk about the ongoing costs Shop for the right deals when looking at streaming options

s I’ve been writing about cord-cutting these last few weeks, I’ve received some feedback from readers asking about the costs involved. They want to cut the cord, but they also want to understand what their monthly costs will be after they jettison pay TV. I suppose the answer is you can spend a little or a lot each month, depending on your programming needs. Another answer is that you can spend nothing each month and just watch free, over-the-air channels for just the onetime cost of an antenna.

INTERNET

If you spend a lot of time watching TV, you’ll want to set up your TV for streaming video. The first thing you’ll need is internet service. JIM ROSSMAN If you have pay TV now, you’re likely getting your internet from the same company in a bundle. Check with your internet provider to see what the monthly costs will be if you eliminate the TV portion of your bundle. Your internet costs could go up or down. In my case, my provider lowered the price of my internet plan to match its “new customer” promotion. I use the same provider for internet and cellphones, so I am still a bundle customer, which helps. In general, you can plan on paying $30 to $100 per month for internet, depending on your plan’s download speed. Local FIOS internet provider Frontier Communications recommends a speed of at least 3 Megabits per second (Mbps) for a single stream of standard definition video. You’ll want 5 Mbps for 1080p HD and 25 Mbps for 4K streaming. If you need for more than one stream at a time in your house, do the math and multiply those numbers to fit your needs. We have one TV in my home, and 25 Mbps internet service is more than adequate for us. Streamers also will need a way to get the content to their TVs. Smart TVs have apps built in to stream the major services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon), but to get the best streaming experience, you’ll likely want to go with a streaming device like a Roku, Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV connected to each TV in your house.

STREAMING BOXES

If you’re trying to keep down costs (aren’t we all?), I’d start with a Roku Express ($29.99), which you can buy at Walmart, Target, Best Buy or Fry’s. You’ll need a TV with an open HDMI port and a wireless router. I recommend the Roku for people who are first-time cord-cutters and those looking for the most content — both free and subscription-based. Once you connect the Roku to your TV, it will walk you through getting it connected to your home network. Once you set up a Roku account online, you can start browsing through the hundreds of channels. With Roku, you’ll see all the biggies — Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Youtube, MLB TV and more, as well as plenty of free channels, many of which are ad supported. The best part of all these cord-cutting streaming video services is there are absolutely no contracts. Want to binge-watch Game of Thrones? Sign up for a month of HBO and start watching, and you can cancel it when you’re finished. There are other streaming boxes. If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, its Fire TV devices are a good deal. Likewise, if you are invested in the Apple ecosystem, the Apple TV boxes are very slick, but they start at $150, so while I use an Apple TV, I don’t recommend them for beginners who are wanting to cut as much cost as possible. For beginners, I’d recommend subscribing to Netflix ($10.99 per month) and Hulu ($7.99 per month) for the first few months. You could also add in a Live TV service like DirecTV Now, YouTube TV, Sling TV, Hulu Live or PlayStation Vue starting at around $35 per month. Of course, your budget will help you decide how much you can spend each month.

ANTENNA

Of course, the purest form of cord-cutting is to pay nothing each month. For the cost of a good antenna ($40 to $100 and up), you can sit back and enjoy more than 100 channels of free content. My current recommendations for antennas are the Mohu Leaf 50 ($59.95) and the ClearStream Eclipse Ampliﬁed ($59.99) antennas for indoor use or the Winegard Elite 7550 ($149.99) for outdoor mounts.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

ENTERTAINMENT

PLAYING

GAMES

Nearly 70 percent of Americans play video games, mostly on smartphones

BY BRIAN CRECENTE

bout 67 percent of Americans, or roughly 211 million people, play video games, according to a new study released by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research. More than half of those who game play on multiple platforms.

The study, which is based on an online survey of 5,000 people, also showed that 90 percent of those play games on their smartphones or tablets — the most popular gaming platform. “Over the past several years, mobile gamers have been a key segment for the games industry to target with marketing spend because of the sheer size and diversity of the audience, as well as the amount of time invested in gaming on this platform,” said Dr. Heather

Nofziger, head of consumer research at EEDAR. “While there continues to be opportunity for growth in mobile, the real potential for growth lies with getting the other groups increasingly involved in gaming across platforms that they may not have considered using for gaming in the past.” Personal computers were the second most popular gaming platform, with 52 percent of gamers playing on a laptop or desktop PC. Consoles were the third most popular gaming platform in

the U.S., with 43 percent, followed by handheld systems with 9 percent. The study also found that gaming takes up about 16 percent of U.S. gamers’ weekly leisure time, totaling an average of 12 hours per week. Gamers spend about the same amount of time on video games as they do consuming other forms of entertainment content each week. Other popular uses of downtime include internet browsing, listening to music and Tribune News Service using social media.

Reviews: Enjoy a 3D virtual movie or gaming experience VR HEADSET

The Royole Moon 3D Mobile Theater brings big screen movies right to your head. The headset has two full-HD 1080p AMOLED displays with resolution larger than 3000 ppi, which creates an amazing theater effect right in front of your eyes. All of this is built into a front-facing display with a minus 7.0 diopter for nearsightREVIEWS edness and plus 2.0 for BY GREGG far-sightedness. ELLMAN The display emulates a giant curved screen with stereoscopic 3D. Moon wears like headphones in great comfort with padded ear cups broadcasting hi-ﬁdelity sound with active noise-canceling. A VR experience is what you want out of this device, and while I’m no expert in audio/video headsets, the experience I got was amazing. On the Moon site, they state the goal of the headset is to “deliver a truly immersive, 3D movie-watching or gaming experience that could be enjoyed anytime and anywhere,” which they absolutely did. What they didn’t say is how addicting they can become. I’m sure gamers will love these, I tried them with a gangster movie and the effects were delivered stunningly in a cinematic experience on the adjust-

able virtual 800-inch screen for 3D or 2D viewing; all without lagging or ghosting. Content is accessed via Wi-Fi, HDMI or you can store digital ﬁles in the 32GB of internal storage. A 6000mAh battery charge takes 2 hours and is good for about 5 hours of video playback. The headset also has a foldable design, which is great when tucking it away to keep your mobile theater in a backpack. While the price can be a little alarming, you must realize all you get in one complete package. And obviously, when you spend $799 on a headset, you want to know a lot more about it. The Moon website (royole. com/moon) is really thorough on formats, sound and specs for everything you would need to know.

The Crossfade 2 Wireless Codex Edition can be operated in a wired mode, with the included V-Moda audio cable inserted into the headphone jack, which switches off all electronics and achieves zero latency. A built-in hidden microphone is there for handsfree calls and a one-button speakeasy cable for wired use is included. A rechargeable lithium-ion battery provides over 14 hours of continuous use.

HEADPHONES

WIRELESS SMART PLUG

V-Moda has announced the new Crossfade 2 Wireless Codex Edition for those who seek professional-grade audio quality. The Bluetooth headphones feature three audio codecs for improved wireless audio quality and universal compatibility.

Crossfade 2 Wireless Codex Edition headphones, $350 available matte black, matte white and rose gold. V-Moda.com

The Amped Wireless Wi-Fi Smart Plug is as simple to use as any smart plug I’ve tried. The plug has a single 120v grounded outlet and one USB charging port (5V/1.5A) built with an overload protection circuit breaker and surge pro-

tection. As for the smart home aspect, it connects to your existing Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) and after you download the free Amped app (iOS and Android) you can control up to 150 devices, according to the Amped website. I tried it with some basic home lights and small kitchen appliances, and it worked perfectly. With the app, you can turn the plug on and off manually as you wish or set up a schedule with speciﬁc times and days. In my case, I had my coffee maker up and running during my wakeup time (which can spoil you very quickly), and I had a lamp turning on and off at speciﬁc times. No matter what I tried, it worked. If you have multiple lights in different rooms that you want to switch on or off at the same time, you can add multiple Amped Wi-Fi Smart Plugs and just run the identical schedule with the app. The smart plug also can be paired to commands with Amazon Alexa. The USB port also is handy to charge smartphones and many other USB devices needing a boost of power. The smart plug controls just one device at a time, but Amped also has a Wi-Fi Smart Power Strip for controlling multiple Tribune News Service devices.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

ENTERTAINMENT

HOW TO FAKE IT IN THE REAL WORLD Advances ignite concerns that video technology could be used to warp perception BY CHRIS BARANIUK

Reboot reading A novel twist to losing yourself in digital books

Instagram introduces ‘gaming’ elements to literature for interactive storytelling

BY HANNA KOZLOWSKA

have an unfortunate weakness for Instagram. It sucks me in like few other things, whether it’s scrolling through my haphazardly curated feed or clicking through stories for half an hour. Sometimes I can’t believe I’m just looking at another person’s vacation or skincare routine; sometimes I ﬁnd it oddly comforting. Still, I usually feel like it’s a waste of my time and that I could be doing other things — like reading books. I’ve always read a lot, and I resent Instagram for eating into my book time — and myself for not being able to put down my phone. I have the Kindle app and have read full books on my phone. But I haven’t been able to make it a habit. Instead, I’ve tended to read shorter pieces of writing on Pocket — the article-saving app — as it’s easier. But it’s even easier still to just look at some pretty photos. That’s why I was intrigued by the New York Public Library’s new project: Instagram novels. The library, which has been an adept social-media user for years, is creating a new way of consuming literature in collaboration with the advertising agency Mother. It recently posted a version of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on Instagram Stories, accompanied by beautiful illustrations from the designer Magoz.

‘INSTA NOVEL’

The book is separated into two parts, and saved to NYPL’s Story “highlights” section of Instagram. Each page is one frame. By default, these frames only stay on your screen for 15 seconds, so NYPL included a special icon on the bottom right of the page to place your thumb which pauses the story so you have enough time to read each page. Alice is the ﬁrst novel it’s put on Instagram, and the library is already planning on putting out two more classics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, NYPL said.

The Insta Novel’s background color is warmer than the white usually found on reading apps, which makes reading on a screen easier, according to a NYPL release. The font is Georgia, which was the ﬁrst serif font designed to make longform text legible and pleasing to read in digital form.

GAMIFYING READING

Although curious, I also was initially skeptical of the idea, which is meant in part to promote the NYPL and its eBooks app. I use Instagram for other things, things I considered lesser pursuits. Long Insta stories usually are a chore to get through. The process seemed cumbersome. And it does take some time to get used to reading a book on Instagram. At first, I was going through the pages very quickly, nervous that the page will disappear. I’d skip pages by mistake. I would get annoyed by having to constantly press my finger down on the placeholder. It also was quite easy to get sidetracked, because it’s Instagram. I’d reach for my phone to read the novel but forget what I was supposed to be doing when I opened the app. It’s far from a perfect reading experience. Once you leave the story, you can’t simply go back to where you left off — it starts over from the beginning when you go back to it. However, because the novel is short, you can, in a matter of seconds, click through to the last page you were reading (although I think the experience would benefit from splitting a book into even smaller chunks and posting those to the account’s story highlights). But the Insta Novel kept me engaged. The illustrated introduction is mesmerizing, and the book is a collection of small, fun surprises. As you “turn” the pages, the thumb placeholder gradually transforms from a keyhole into an opening eye and then into a watch (and other icons, which I won’t spoil), all in true Alice in Wonderland spirit. It felt a bit like a game

SPOTIFY’S TOP HITS

1.69

BILLION STREAMS SHAPE OF YOU ED SHEERAN

1.07

BILLION

THINKING OUT LOUD

ED SHEERAN

1.45

— waiting to see what visual element appears next — following the poems line by line. Going from chapter to chapter weirdly felt like completing levels. There are animated pages that work well with the strange recitations and songs by Alice and the different creatures she encounters. The Mouse’s Tail poem, which in the original printed book is shaped into an actual tail, actually slithers on the screen. Introducing these “gaming” elements into reading a novel likely is to make most book-lovers cringe. But it could get more people reading: In only a few days after it was posted, nearly 40,000 people opened the novel and clicked through to the end, the NYPL told USA Today. Another potential positive side-effect is changing our Instagram behaviors. It could convince some people to reduce the time they mindlessly scroll through the app and consume empty content that hurts their self-esteem or induces a plethora of unhealthy feelings. Reading Alice was delightful and amusing, and with some hiccups, it did prevent me from, well, going down the often pointless Instagram rabbit hole. The Insta Novel also can counteract the short attention span social media has fostered in internet users. Reading generally forces focus, and the gaming elements help make it engrossing. “Gamifying” a novel almost seems like the opposite of the healthy approach to reading — treating it as a “meandering stroll” rather than a hunt or checklist. And I don’t think it ever could or should substitute more traditional forms of reading. But on the other hand, taking in chunks of a clever, fragmentary novel (I doubt a plot-driven opus will work well with the format), is another form of casual literary exploration, allowing you to dip your toe in a great piece of art while indulging in the guilty Quartz pleasure that is Instagram.

ALL-TIME MOST STREAMED SONGS

1.25

BILLION

BILLION CLOSER ONE DANCE THE CHAINSMOKERS DRAKE

1.05 BILLION

SORRY JUSTIN BIEBER

1.04 BILLION

DESPACITO LUIS FONSI/DADDY YANKEE

1. 1 0 BILLION

LEAN ON MAJOR LAZER/DJ SNAKE

1.03 BILLION

LOVE YOURSELF JUSTIN BIEBER

A FAKE is only as good as it looks. And while forging a counterfeit handbag or watch takes time and effort, churning out fake videos has become surprisingly easy. A new system can turn a few simple animated line drawings into realistic fake clips in high definition. The software is open source, meaning it is available to anyone — and it has reignited concerns that such tools could be used to warp our perception of the world. A team at graphics hardware firm Nvidia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created the system, which uses a generative adversarial network — a type of artificial intelligence. To create a fake, the AI first breaks down a real video into component layers, such as foreground and background, and key elements, like buildings and trees. This provides a basic, editable structure onto which fake elements can be added. One part of the AI then generates frames of a new video sequence based on basic sketches, while another attempts to distinguish the generated frames from real video frames. If it can’t tell them apart, those new frames are judged good enough and are inserted into the synthesized video. The resulting footage can be produced at 2K resolution and looks startlingly lifelike. Examples the team has produced include street scenes, and people talking or performing dance moves. “It is sort of stunning, the progress that has been made,” said digital forensics expert Hany Farid at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. This type of video has become known as a deepfake, and fake videos of world leaders, such as Donald Trump and Theresa May, have been created using similar techniques. A community dedicated to creating faked pornography videos containing famous actors has sprung up too. The technology to create deepfakes had largely been private or had produced cartoonish results, said Berlin-based artist and programmer Gene Kogan. That has now changed. Will this latest system be used to convince us that a politician said something they didn’t, for instance? Distinguishing real videos from fake ones now is a “significant problem”, Farid said, but he thinks informed fact-checkers still likely are to be able to detect fakes for some time to come. However, damage still can be done while this checking takes place.

REAL HARM

Fake videos recently have been implicated in the deaths of more than 20 people in India. This started after a video clip showing two men on a motorcycle snatching children on the streets went viral on WhatsApp. The video originally was a public service announcement in Pakistan to raise awareness of human trafficking. However, it was edited to remove the message at the end. The clip was thought real, and widely spread WhatsApp messages pointed the ﬁnger at organ thieves disguised as beggars, which sparked public outrage leading to mob killings. In India, in excess of 200 million people use WhatsApp and some regularly forward messages to many contacts much as people post on social media. As with Facebook and Twitter, this process can lead to the spreading of false information. To counteract the phenomenon, WhatsApp has published educational ads in newspapers in India, and has made it more difficult to forward media to many contacts.

TELLING THE TRUTH

Fake videos also exhibit some telltale signs. Bogus videos of politicians can be detected by checking whether the individual blinks often enough to be real, for example. Knowing such videos exist could make people more comfortable discounting things that are in fact real. “That in some ways is the real threat,” Farid said, “that we don’t believe anything anymore.” One example of this is in the U.S., where people caught with images of sexual abuse of children have claimed that it was computer generated — known as the virtual defense. Possessing such generated images still is a crime, but it comes with a shorter sentence. However, there are many legitimate uses for the technology. For example, the same principles can be used to synthesize architectural designs after supplying the system with a basic sketch of a building, which could be helpful for designers. Or celebrities could “license their faces” for use in video advertising, without having to actually New Scientist be present for ﬁlming.

THE DIGITAL USER

2018

PROFILES

37 YEARS AGO,

Steve Jobs INSPIRED APPLE’S MOST AMAZING AD.

Here’s the story (it’s almost been forgotten)

BY BILL MURPHY JR.

hen Steve Jobs ran Apple (both times), the company saw some of its most innovative moments in engineering and execution. But it also showed off some of its most important ads and marketing tactics. One of these campaigns nearly has been forgotten. It took place 37 years ago. And if it hadn’t happened, it’s likely none of the later success would have followed. Here’s the story, the ad, and the legacy.

APPLE VS. EVERYONE

Apple went public in 1980 and made 300 millionaires. But just a few months later it faced an existential crisis. The personal computer market was large and growing, but it still was utterly dwarfed by the market for mainframe business computers, which was dominated by IBM: “International Business Machines.” And in August 1981, IBM announced it was getting into the personal computer market. It’s funny to think now, but IBM coming into Apple’s market then was kind of like Apple or Google or Amazon coming into your market today. Potentially terrifying, maybe even worse.

‘WELCOME, IBM’

Only, Jobs wasn’t really worried. As Walter Isaacson wrote in his 2011 biography, right after IBM announced its new computer, Jobs had his team buy one and tear it apart. Their consensus was that it sucked, “[a] hackneyed attempt.” Apple became cocky, not realizing that corporate technology managers might feel more comfortable buying from an established company like IBM rather than one named after a piece of fruit. Okay, Jobs thought. With “cheeky conﬁdence,” as Isaacson put it, he decided to take out a full page ad in The Wall Street Journal, in order to “cleverly positio[n] the upcoming computer battle as a two-way contest between the spunky and rebellious Apple and the establishment Goliath IBM.” Its headline: “Welcome, IBM. Seriously” (Added beneﬁt: There actually were other personal computer companies that were just as successful as Apple at the time, like Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne. The Apple ad ignored them.)

THE LEGACY

The ad was a big deal. But Apple didn’t win against IBM right away, and there’s a reason why people remember the “1984” ad, the “Think Different” campaign and many others before they remember this one. It’s actually been imitated many times, including in 2015 when a now-bankrupt music streaming company tweeted a similar message to Apple. (Also, the 2016 ad that Slack took out in The New York Times, welcoming Microsoft to its industry.)

But without this “Welcome IBM” ad, would Apple of 1981 have lived long enough to become the Apple of 2018? Way back when — ancient history — it was decisions like these to position Apple as the true rebel, and to frame the battle one-on-one against the entrenched competition, that helped Apple move forward and ultimately have the chance to become the company it is today. Which is to say, the enInc. trenched competition.

Facebook’s striking new Menlo Park building is akin to village with office neighborhoods Design to foster a culture that mirrors company’s goal BY GEORGE AVALOS

The official name of Facebook’s newest office building, MPK 21, may evoke computer jargon, but the gleaming new offices at its headquarters are anything but mundane — they offer a village where employees can create and relax. Employees have started moving into the company’s new offices in a long, airy building, which features a “main street” meandering down the middle, along with office “neighborhoods” that have sprouted off to the side. Workers can stroll on a rooftop, gather in “town squares” featuring redwood trees, or pause in a terraced area called “The Bowl” that is like a botanical garden. Frank Gehry, the world-famous architect who previously designed Facebook’s adjacent building, also created the new offices. The building is designed to reﬂect the social networking company’s culture and its stated mission of bringing communities together. Facebook, like many other technology companies, is determined to create inviting work areas that can help to lure skilled recruits and keep existing employees happy.

“There is a sense of energy and connection in this building, and you see people collaborating,” said John Tenanes, Facebook’s vice president of global facilities and real estate. “We want them to get a feel for how work is done here.” The offices also include an events center where CEO Mark Zuckerberg intends to hold weekly question-and-answer sessions, Tenanes said. The building’s design is intended to foster the internal community-build-

ing that mirrors the social network’s goal of helping to connect communities worldwide. “You see lots of gathering places ... sort of spontaneous nooks where people can get together without reserving a conference room,” said Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources. “We want places that give you headdown quiet space, but also spaces where there is more energy that provides you connecThe Mercury News tions to colleagues.”

THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES? What it’s like to wallow in your own Facebook data BY ANNA WIENER

I found my way to the Download Your Information tool in late March, soon after a whistle-blower revealed that the political-consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had gathered information about tens of millions of Facebook users. The tool, which Mark Zuckerberg referenced several times in his testimony to Congress in April, is tucked away in Facebook’s account settings. It allows users to access extensive archives of their own content, giving a nod to demands for greater corporate transparency and helping the company satisfy new data-protection requirements in the European Union. It also offers an opportunity to view oneself through the eyes of Facebook’s partners, researchers, advertisers and algorithms, in an act of reverse surveillance. My own download held the usual digital flotsam — not all the information I had ever volunteered to the platform, but a lot of it: date of birth, phone number, schools. There was a list of advertising topics for which I could be targeted — some accurate, some more like divination than data science — alongside content I’d created: chat transcripts, event listings, photographs and videos. I was startled to find dozens of videos I had deleted before posting or sharing with friends, an embarrassment of outtakes. There I was, lower-resolution and smoother-skinned, staring at the computer camera and adjusting my bangs. It was like watching B-roll for a documentary about my insecurities. (Facebook has since announced that the inclusion of deleted videos was the result of a bug, and said it was planning to discard the data from its servers.) The videos were jarring to discover — and suggested questionable data-retention practices at Facebook — but they were not entirely unwelcome. The download also included a reverse-chronologically organized list of “friends,” everyone I had connected to — and disconnected from — on the platform. Scrolling through it, I could see the contours of a life taking shape. The data download was a time capsule of sorts, a rare record of time spent digitally. But as I returned to the folder, a familiar sense of dread crept in. If anything, Download Your Information is a consolation prize offered to those of us on the losing end of surveillance capitalism. The folder underscored some of social media’s most unappealing qualities: the distortion of a natural, human experience of time, and an insistence on never quite letting things go. I dislike Facebook, both the platform and the corporate ethos. I am put off by the company’s coyness around its role in the media ecosystem, and by the way some Facebook employees talk about their employer, as if one of the most valuable companies in the world is just a misunderstood do-gooder. I do not even find the website pleasing, with its bland, homogeneous design, corny animations and attempts to encourage nostalgia at scale. For all the bittersweet charm they offer, Facebook’s downloadable user-data packets are artifacts of corporate cowardice. It is by no means a complete record of the company’s data-collection practices; Facebook itself has said as much. The data-analytics software that facilitates the collection and aggregation of user information is sophisticated — it likely is keeping track of the sort of metrics that have become standard across the industry, such as the pathways users take across the site and the app; what is clicked, and when; and how frequently a user searches for a name or keyword. My data download contained no traces of this sophistication. Still, as I rifled through all this, I wanted to feel angrier than I did. But after a while, I just felt sad. Here was the stuff of a life, and I had given it away to the internet — much of it likely would be stored on Facebook’s servers ad infinitum, useful only to advertisers and algorithms. Rediscovering these photos with my friends gave us an excuse to briefly reminisce and catch up, to wax nostalgic and commune in our mutual embarrassment that our late-night liberal-arts philosophizing now belonged to a gigantic tech corporation. It was a welcome reminder that my actual social network runs deep, that these relationships, however dispersed, are the realest things I have going. For the first time in my experience, Facebook lived up to its marketing materials: In providing a way off the platform, it had fostered a human The Atlantic connection.