For a brief window this morning, something strange happened to the internet.
At approximately 9:15am ET, display ads disappeared across mega-trafficked media websites such as BuzzFeed, Time, Forbes, Gawker and Vox, replaced instead by big, blank spaces. Some were understandably pleased at the mini-vacation they got from companies making money from their eyeballs, but those running the websites weren’t so happy—and neither was Google. It was the one who was supposed to supply those ads.
The end result? A ton of lost money for all those websites—and for Google. How much? That’s hard to say. But Google alone likely lost several hundred thousands dollars in about an hour and a half—and the other sites lost a comparable amount, if not more.
In the wake of the ads outage, Google scrambled to figure out what caused it, and by 10:45am, most websites were back to normal. Google posted a quick memo—which reads like a sigh of relief—saying things were back up and running.
The glitch was caused by the ad tool called DoubleClick for Publishers, or DFP—a Google advertising service used by many websites to manage ad operations, and whose content is hosted on Google machines rather than the servers that hold the publisher’s own content.
Google says it doesn’t publicly reveal its revenue stream for DoubleClick for Publishers, instead lumping it in under “other” revenue on its earnings reports. That includes anything that doesn’t come from ad revenue on its own websites or from websites that use its AdSense ad network. Based on the company’s 2013 annual report, it made $568,000 per hour in “other” revenue across the internet. Though this includes more than DoubleClick dollars, we can roughly estimate that the company lost something approaching $1 million from this morning’s ad server hiccup.
The last time Google’s DFP system failed was more than a year ago, in March 2013, when the service was down for several hours. This sort of outage may please you in some way, but don’t get used to it. The internet, after all, runs on ads.
Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Photo: Trey Ratcliff/Flickr
For a brief window this morning, something strange happened to the internet.
At approximately 9:15am ET, display ads disappeared across mega-trafficked media websites such as BuzzFeed, Time, Forbes, Gawker and Vox, replaced instead by big, blank spaces. Some were understandably pleased at the mini-vacation they got from companies making money from their eyeballs, but those running the websites weren’t so happy—and neither was Google. It was the one who was supposed to supply those ads.
The end result? A ton of lost money for all those websites—and for Google. How much? That’s hard to say. But Google alone likely lost several hundred thousands dollars in about an hour and a half—and the other sites lost a comparable amount, if not more.
In the wake of the ads outage, Google scrambled to figure out what caused it, and by 10:45am, most websites were back to normal. Google posted a quick memo—which reads like a sigh of relief—saying things were back up and running.
The glitch was caused by the ad tool called DoubleClick for Publishers, or DFP—a Google advertising service used by many websites to manage ad operations, and whose content is hosted on Google machines rather than the servers that hold the publisher’s own content.
Google says it doesn’t publicly reveal its revenue stream for DoubleClick for Publishers, instead lumping it in under “other” revenue on its earnings reports. That includes anything that doesn’t come from ad revenue on its own websites or from websites that use its AdSense ad network. Based on the company’s 2013 annual report, it made $568,000 per hour in “other” revenue across the internet. Though this includes more than DoubleClick dollars, we can roughly estimate that the company lost something approaching $1 million from this morning’s ad server hiccup.
The last time Google’s DFP system failed was more than a year ago, in March 2013, when the service was down for several hours. This sort of outage may please you in some way, but don’t get used to it. The internet, after all, runs on ads.
Scientists from Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School Department of Ophthalmology have used the power of new genomic technology to discover that microbes that commonly infect the eye have special, previously unknown properties. These properties are predicted to allow the bacterium -- Streptococcus pneumoniae -- to specifically stick to the surface of the eye, grow, and cause damage and inflammation.
Researchers are now using this information to develop new ways to treat and prevent this bacterium, which is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics. Their findings are in the current issue of Nature Communications.
S. pneumoniae is a leading cause of infection and is responsible for diseases ranging from infection of the lungs, pneumonia, to infection of the brain, to infection of the surface of the eye known as conjunctivitis. Although infection of the eye can usually be safely treated, S. pneumoniae infection is a leading cause of illness and death worldwide.
According to Mass. Eye and Ear researcher Michael S. Gilmore, Sir William Osler Professor of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School, an effective vaccine is available that helps prevent many of the most severe types of infection. "I believe it is especially important for children and the elderly to be vaccinated. The vaccine causes the body to react to a slimy coating on the bacterial surface called a "capsule." The capsule allows S. pneumoniae to escape from white blood cells that try to eliminate it, and S. pneumoniae goes on to cause lung and other infections."
However, the strains of S. pneumoniae that cause eye infection have been known to lack this capsule, yet they still cause infection. "Because they lack the capsule, they are not affected by the vaccine either," he continued.
To design a better vaccine, and to understand how these "unencapsulated" strains of S. pneumoniae are still able to cause infection of the ocular surface, the research team, spearheaded by postdoctoral researcher Michael Valentino and including Mass. Eye and Ear scientists Wolfgang Haas and Paulo Bispo, as well as a collaborative team from the Broad Institute of Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and elsewhere, examined the genomes of a large collection of S. pneumoniae strains collected from across the United States.
"We found that about 90 percent of the conjunctivitis strains were very closely related and formed a new group of S. pneumoniae with infectious properties that were different from any other known strains," Dr. Gilmore said. "These new properties are believed to allow S. pneumoniae to resist the normal clearance mechanisms of the surface of the eye, including blinking and tears, stick to the eye surface, grow there and cause damage."
Dr. Gilmore believes that including some of the S. pneumoniae proteins that allow the bacterium to do this in a new type of vaccine, might lead to the prevention of nearly 90 percent of the cases of conjunctivitis caused by this microbe and save the use of antibiotics for more severe infections.
Taylor Swift is playing on a streaming service. Sort of. I’m getting a demo of YouTube’s new music offering and the first thing I ask to hear is pop’s current reigning queen. (Until Beyoncé stealth-drops a new album, at least.) Within seconds, “Shake It Off” is playing.
This is a glimpse at YouTube Music Key, a streaming music service that’s hoping to bring some new competition to existing offerings like Rdio or Spotify (which has been in the crosshairs since Swift swiftly removed her music from the service two weeks ago). By harnessing all the music on the site—and the deals YouTube made with artists and labels to get/keep it there—Music Key takes the habit we all already have of pulling up YouTube clips when we want to hear songs and turns it into a music player that’s ready to go on your desktop or mobile device, even if you’re offline.
“Taylor’s videos have been successful on YouTube—she has over nine million subscribers on the platform, making her one of our most subscribed musicians,” YouTube’s director of music partnerships Christophe Muller says while discussing YouTube’s new music streaming features, which the company announced today. “So we’re working hard to have more ways for her and all the other musicians to have their music discovered and to earn more revenue.”
Of course, what you can hear from Swift’s new album 1989 is only the music she’s made available, which at the moment is only “Shake It Off” and the instantly-viral video released this week for “Blank Space”—but that’s still more than other streaming services. And since it’s on YouTube, fans of Swift—or fans of any particular artist— can follow up “Shake It Off” with, say, the outtakes from the song’s video shoot or music from complete unknowns recording covers, doing remixes, or making similar tunes. (Remember, not too long ago even Justin Bieber was just a kid uploading his own clips to the site.)
YouTube’s new music offerings work both in web browswers and mobile apps (it’s coming to Android first). The mobile version has two tiers: A free ad-supported service for streaming playlists, and Music Key, a premium offering that’s $7.99 per month for beta users but will be eventually go up to $9.99 per month. Although the free version will require users to hear/watch the occasional ad, just like YouTube users currently do, Music Key removes them, and additionally gives mobile users something they’ve wanted for a long time: the ability to keep YouTube playlists running in the background while they use other apps or have their screen locked. It also allows them to download playlists for use offline. (Hello, airplane mode!)
courtesy YouTube
The beta will go to a group of heavy music listeners on YouTube, Muller says, and is primarily focused on getting user feedback. One of those pieces of feedback the company is looking for is what does and doesn’t qualify as music. Songs from artist pages qualify, obviously, but what about a crummy karaoke version of their songs? An artist discussing their cat on a late-night talk show—is that music? YouTube is hoping users will let the company know what needs to be in Music Key.
“You didn’t just watch ‘All About That Bass’ 200+ million times on YouTube,” the company wrote in a blog post today announcing the service. “You watched Meghan Trainor perform it live for the first time ever, and later with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots. You used the song in tens of thousands of your videos, like covering it with an upright bass. Your views helped put the song at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks.”
As for having the non-hits, YouTube is working on those as well, securing high-quality deep cuts (aka non-singles) from record labels—currently all the majors like Universal and Sony and hundreds of indie labels—for use on the service as well. There’s also the possibility that music uploaded in fan videos and monetized by YouTube’s Content ID could show up in Music Key playlists as well. Oh, and Music Key subscribers also get subscriptions to Google Play Music, so there’s that.
So, will this be better for artists than other streaming music services? Maybe. YouTube’s Muller was reluctant to give out specifics about what the payouts would be for tracks streamed through their new service and whether or not they would be better than, say, the $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream Spotify pays to rights holders. He does, however, note that having money coming in from ad-supported videos and subscription fees adds a revenue stream.
Or, at least, hopefully it will. Mark Mulligan, an analyst for Midia Research in the UK, noted in a blog post that “just seven percent of consumers say they would pay for a YouTube subscription service without ads and including extra content … but 25 percent say they will never pay for a subscription service because they get all the music they need for free from YouTube. The net balance is clearly negative.”
After Swift pulled her music from Spotify, she told Yahoo Music she felt the service felt like an experiment, “and I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music.” (Others agreed.) Scott Borchetta, the president of her label Big Machine Label Group, went on to say in a radio interview they didn’t want to be disrespectful to superfans who paid for the record and then heard from their friends “‘Why did you pay for it? It’s free on Spotify.'” Swift seems more amenable to YouTube, she did premiere “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” on the site, after all. And perhaps other artists who’ve gotten huge buzz from videos—like Nicki Minaj did with the 293-million-views-and-counting “Anaconda” video—will also see benefits.
“If YouTube can fully harness its rich set of non-core catalogue assets, such as live concert streams, artist hangouts, YouTube sessions etc. then Music Key has the potential to be the most compelling music subscription offer yet,” Mulligan concluded in his blog post. “But YouTube’s innovation has never been the problem, it is its impact on the wider market that matters most.”
So hopefully this is a music experiment fans and artists can get behind.
U.S. President Barack Obama, right, smiles after a group of children waved flags and flowers to cheer him during a welcome ceremony with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2014. Andy Wong/AP
In a surprise announcement Tuesday night, the world’s two biggest economies and greenhouse gas emitters, United States and China, said they will partner closely on a broad-ranging package of plans to fight climate change, including new targets to reduce carbon pollution, according to a statement from the White House.
The announcement comes after President Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping today in Beijing, and includes headline-grabbing commitments from both countries that are sure to breathe new life into negotiations to reach a new climate treaty in Paris next year.
According to the plan, the United States will reduce carbon emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, nearly twice the existing target—without imposing new restrictions on power plants or vehicles.
Tuesday’s announcement is equally remarkable for China’s commitment. For the first time, China has set a date at which it expects its emissions will “peak,” or finally begin to taper downward: around 2030. China is currently the world’s biggest emitter of carbon pollution, largely because of its coal-dependent economy, and reining in emissions while continuing to grow has been the paramount challenge for China’s leaders.
The White House said in a statement that China could reach the target even sooner than 2030. It “expects that China will succeed in peaking its emissions before 2030 based on its broad economic reform program, plans to address air pollution, and implementation of President Xi’s call for an energy revolution.”
But the White House was more cautiously optimistic on China’s plan to reach the goal of 20 percent total energy consumption from zero-emission sources by 2030. It painted a picture of the challenges ahead for the energy-hungry giant: “It will require China to deploy an additional 800-1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero emission generation capacity by 2030—more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.”
“This is clearly a sign of the seriousness and the importance the Chinese government is giving to this issue,” said Barbara Finamore, Asia director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental advocacy group, in an interview from Hong Kong. “The relationship [between the US and China] is tricky, but climate has been one of the areas where the two sides can and are finding common ground.”
The announcement also sets the stage for conflict with the Senate’s new Republican leadership, which just Tuesday signaled that attacking Obama’s climate initiatives will be a top priority in 2015.
The plan does not entail using the US Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, as the bulk of Obama’s existing climate strategy does. Instead, it involves a series of initiatives to be undertaken in partnership between the two countries, including:
Expanding funding for clean energy technology research at the US-China Clean Energy Research Center, a think tank Obama created in 2009 with Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao.
Launching a large-scale pilot project in China to study carbon capture and sequestration.
A push to further limit the use of hydroflourocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas found in refrigerants.
A federal framework for cities in both countries to share experiences and best practices for low-carbon economic growth and adaptation to the impacts of climate change at the municipal level.
A call to boost trade in “green” goods, including energy efficiency technology and resilient infrastructure, kicked off by a tour of China next spring by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
NRDC’s Finamore said the magnitude of the agreement—which was made well in advance of expectations—will provide fresh impetus to the drive for a new global climate agreement in Paris next year. “Hopefully this will give new ambition to other countries as well to move forward quickly,” she said. The agreement “sends a powerful signal to every other country that they are serious and are willing to come to the table to reach a global agreement.”
“Even if the targets aren’t as ambitious as many might hope, the world’s two largest carbon emitters are stepping up together with serious commitments,” said Bob Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a Washington policy group. “This will help get other countries on board and greatly improves the odds for a solid global deal next year in Paris.”
“For too long it’s been too easy for both the US and China to hide behind one another,” he said. Or as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon put it: “Today, China and the United States have demonstrated the leadership that the world expects of them.”
This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Taylor Swift is playing on a streaming service. Sort of. I’m getting a demo of YouTube’s new music offering and the first thing I ask to hear is pop’s current reigning queen. (Until Beyoncé stealth-drops a new album, at least.) Within seconds, “Shake It Off” is playing.
This is a glimpse at YouTube Music Key, a streaming music service that’s hoping to bring some new competition to existing offerings like Rdio or Spotify (which has been in the crosshairs since Swift swiftly removed her music from the service two weeks ago). By harnessing all the music on the site—and the deals YouTube made with artists and labels to get/keep it there—Music Key takes the habit we all already have of pulling up YouTube clips when we want to hear songs and turns it into a music player that’s ready to go on your desktop or mobile device, even if you’re offline.
“Taylor’s videos have been successful on YouTube—she has over nine million subscribers on the platform, making her one of our most subscribed musicians,” YouTube’s director of music partnerships Christophe Muller says while discussing YouTube’s new music streaming features, which the company announced today. “So we’re working hard to have more ways for her and all the other musicians to have their music discovered and to earn more revenue.”
Of course, what you can hear from Swift’s new album 1989 is only the music she’s made available, which at the moment is only “Shake It Off” and the instantly-viral video released this week for “Blank Space”—but that’s still more than other streaming services. And since it’s on YouTube, fans of Swift—or fans of any particular artist— can follow up “Shake It Off” with, say, the outtakes from the song’s video shoot or music from complete unknowns recording covers, doing remixes, or making similar tunes. (Remember, not too long ago even Justin Bieber was just a kid uploading his own clips to the site.)
YouTube’s new music offerings work both in web browswers and mobile apps (it’s coming to Android first). The mobile version has two tiers: A free ad-supported service for streaming playlists, and Music Key, a premium offering that’s $7.99 per month for beta users but will be eventually go up to $9.99 per month. Although the free version will require users to hear/watch the occasional ad, just like YouTube users currently do, Music Key removes them, and additionally gives mobile users something they’ve wanted for a long time: the ability to keep YouTube playlists running in the background while they use other apps or have their screen locked. It also allows them to download playlists for use offline. (Hello, airplane mode!)
courtesy YouTube
The beta will go to a group of heavy music listeners on YouTube, Muller says, and is primarily focused on getting user feedback. One of those pieces of feedback the company is looking for is what does and doesn’t qualify as music. Songs from artist pages qualify, obviously, but what about a crummy karaoke version of their songs? An artist discussing their cat on a late-night talk show—is that music? YouTube is hoping users will let the company know what needs to be in Music Key.
“You didn’t just watch ‘All About That Bass’ 200+ million times on YouTube,” the company wrote in a blog post today announcing the service. “You watched Meghan Trainor perform it live for the first time ever, and later with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots. You used the song in tens of thousands of your videos, like covering it with an upright bass. Your views helped put the song at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks.”
As for having the non-hits, YouTube is working on those as well, securing high-quality deep cuts (aka non-singles) from record labels—currently all the majors like Universal and Sony and hundreds of indie labels—for use on the service as well. There’s also the possibility that music uploaded in fan videos and monetized by YouTube’s Content ID could show up in Music Key playlists as well. Oh, and Music Key subscribers also get subscriptions to Google Play Music, so there’s that.
So, will this be better for artists than other streaming music services? Maybe. YouTube’s Muller was reluctant to give out specifics about what the payouts would be for tracks streamed through their new service and whether or not they would be better than, say, the $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream Spotify pays to rights holders. He does, however, note that having money coming in from ad-supported videos and subscription fees adds a revenue stream.
Or, at least, hopefully it will. Mark Mulligan, an analyst for Midia Research in the UK, noted in a blog post that “just seven percent of consumers say they would pay for a YouTube subscription service without ads and including extra content … but 25 percent say they will never pay for a subscription service because they get all the music they need for free from YouTube. The net balance is clearly negative.”
After Swift pulled her music from Spotify, she told Yahoo Music she felt the service felt like an experiment, “and I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music.” (Others agreed.) Scott Borchetta, the president of her label Big Machine Label Group, went on to say in a radio interview they didn’t want to be disrespectful to superfans who paid for the record and then heard from their friends “‘Why did you pay for it? It’s free on Spotify.'” Swift seems more amenable to YouTube, she did premiere “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” on the site, after all. And perhaps other artists who’ve gotten huge buzz from videos—like Nicki Minaj did with the 293-million-views-and-counting “Anaconda” video—will also see benefits.
“If YouTube can fully harness its rich set of non-core catalogue assets, such as live concert streams, artist hangouts, YouTube sessions etc. then Music Key has the potential to be the most compelling music subscription offer yet,” Mulligan concluded in his blog post. “But YouTube’s innovation has never been the problem, it is its impact on the wider market that matters most.”
So hopefully this is a music experiment fans and artists can get behind.
U.S. President Barack Obama, right, smiles after a group of children waved flags and flowers to cheer him during a welcome ceremony with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2014. Andy Wong/AP
In a surprise announcement Tuesday night, the world’s two biggest economies and greenhouse gas emitters, United States and China, said they will partner closely on a broad-ranging package of plans to fight climate change, including new targets to reduce carbon pollution, according to a statement from the White House.
The announcement comes after President Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping today in Beijing, and includes headline-grabbing commitments from both countries that are sure to breathe new life into negotiations to reach a new climate treaty in Paris next year.
According to the plan, the United States will reduce carbon emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, nearly twice the existing target—without imposing new restrictions on power plants or vehicles.
Tuesday’s announcement is equally remarkable for China’s commitment. For the first time, China has set a date at which it expects its emissions will “peak,” or finally begin to taper downward: around 2030. China is currently the world’s biggest emitter of carbon pollution, largely because of its coal-dependent economy, and reining in emissions while continuing to grow has been the paramount challenge for China’s leaders.
The White House said in a statement that China could reach the target even sooner than 2030. It “expects that China will succeed in peaking its emissions before 2030 based on its broad economic reform program, plans to address air pollution, and implementation of President Xi’s call for an energy revolution.”
But the White House was more cautiously optimistic on China’s plan to reach the goal of 20 percent total energy consumption from zero-emission sources by 2030. It painted a picture of the challenges ahead for the energy-hungry giant: “It will require China to deploy an additional 800-1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero emission generation capacity by 2030—more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.”
“This is clearly a sign of the seriousness and the importance the Chinese government is giving to this issue,” said Barbara Finamore, Asia director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, the environmental advocacy group, in an interview from Hong Kong. “The relationship [between the US and China] is tricky, but climate has been one of the areas where the two sides can and are finding common ground.”
The announcement also sets the stage for conflict with the Senate’s new Republican leadership, which just Tuesday signaled that attacking Obama’s climate initiatives will be a top priority in 2015.
The plan does not entail using the US Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, as the bulk of Obama’s existing climate strategy does. Instead, it involves a series of initiatives to be undertaken in partnership between the two countries, including:
Expanding funding for clean energy technology research at the US-China Clean Energy Research Center, a think tank Obama created in 2009 with Xi’s predecessor Hu Jintao.
Launching a large-scale pilot project in China to study carbon capture and sequestration.
A push to further limit the use of hydroflourocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas found in refrigerants.
A federal framework for cities in both countries to share experiences and best practices for low-carbon economic growth and adaptation to the impacts of climate change at the municipal level.
A call to boost trade in “green” goods, including energy efficiency technology and resilient infrastructure, kicked off by a tour of China next spring by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
NRDC’s Finamore said the magnitude of the agreement—which was made well in advance of expectations—will provide fresh impetus to the drive for a new global climate agreement in Paris next year. “Hopefully this will give new ambition to other countries as well to move forward quickly,” she said. The agreement “sends a powerful signal to every other country that they are serious and are willing to come to the table to reach a global agreement.”
“Even if the targets aren’t as ambitious as many might hope, the world’s two largest carbon emitters are stepping up together with serious commitments,” said Bob Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a Washington policy group. “This will help get other countries on board and greatly improves the odds for a solid global deal next year in Paris.”
“For too long it’s been too easy for both the US and China to hide behind one another,” he said. Or as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon put it: “Today, China and the United States have demonstrated the leadership that the world expects of them.”
This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues its run as one of the most popular technology buzzwords of the year, the discussion has turned from what it is, to how to drive value from it, to the tactical: how to make it work.
IoT will produce a treasure trove of big data – data that can help cities predict accidents and crimes, give doctors real-time insight into information from pacemakers or biochips, enable optimized productivity across industries through predictive maintenance on equipment and machinery, create truly smart homes with connected appliances and provide critical communication between self-driving cars. The possibilities that IoT brings to the table are endless.
As the rapid expansion of devices and sensors connected to the Internet of Things continues, the sheer volume of data being created by them will increase to a mind-boggling level. This data will hold extremely valuable insight into what’s working well or what’s not – pointing out conflicts that arise and providing high-value insight into new business risks and opportunities as correlations and associations are made.
It sounds great. However, the big problem will be finding ways to analyze the deluge of performance data and information that all these devices create. If you’ve ever tried to find insight in terabytes of machine data, you know how hard this can be. It’s simply impossible for humans to review and understand all of this data – and doing so with traditional methods, even if you cut down the sample size, simply takes too much time.
We need to improve the speed and accuracy of big data analysis in order for IoT to live up to its promise. If we don’t, the consequences could be disastrous and could range from the annoying – like home appliances that don’t work together as advertised – to the life-threatening – pacemakers malfunctioning or hundred car pileups.
The only way to keep up with this IoT-generated data and gain the hidden insight it holds is with machine learning.
Wikipedia defines machine learning as “a subfield of computer science (CS) and artificial intelligence (AI) that deals with the construction and study of systems that can learn from data, rather than follow only explicitly programmed instructions.”
While this may sound a bit like science fiction, it’s already present in everyday life. For example, it’s used by Pandora to determine what other songs you may like, or by Amazon.com to suggest other books and movies to you. Both are based on what has been learned about the user and are refined over time as the system learns more about your behaviors.
In an IoT situation, machine learning can help companies take the billions of data points they have and boil them down to what’s really meaningful. The general premise is the same as in the retail applications – review and analyze the data you’ve collected to find patterns or similarities that can be learned from, so that better decisions can be made.
For example, wearable devices that track your health are already a burgeoning industry – but soon these will evolve to become devices that are both inter-connected and connected to the internet, tracking your health and providing real-time updates to a health service.
The goal is that your doctor would receive notification if a certain condition was met – your heart rate increased to an unsafe level, or even stopped, for example. To be able to call out potential problems, the data has to be analyzed in terms of what’s normal and what’s not. Similarities, correlations and abnormalities need to be quickly identified based on the real-time streams of data. Could this be done by an individual working at the health service – reviewing data from thousands of patients in real-time and correctly deciding when to send an emergency flag out? Not likely – writing code, or rules, to scour thru the data to find known patterns is enormously time consuming, fraught with error and limited to only identifying previously known patterns.
In order to analyze the data immediately as it’s collected to accurately identify previously known and never-before seen new patterns, machines that are capable of generating and aggregating this big data must also be used to learn normal behaviors for each patient and track, uncover and flag anything outside the norm that could indicate a critical health issue.
The realization of IoT depends on being able to gain the insights hidden in the vast and growing seas of data available. Since current approaches don’t scale to IoT volumes, the future realization of IoT’s promise is dependent on machine learning to find the patterns, correlations and anomalies that have the potential of enabling improvements in almost every facet of our daily lives.
It’s time to let the machines point out where the opportunities truly are.
Mark Jaffe is CEO of the anomaly detection company Prelert.
Pick up the new Nexus 6, and its screen comes to life in anticipation. The phone—a joint effort from Motorola and Google—senses that you’re handling it, and its display lights up. Staying in a dim and monochrome ambient mode, it shows your most important notifications in a clean stack, with the most urgent stuff on top. Tap one of those notifications, and everything suddenly turns colorful. A little ripple rolls out, just for a fraction of a second, from the spot on the screen where you placed your finger, and the notification expands to stand out from the others in the group. It’s both very pretty, and very useful.
This is the newest embodiment of Google’s mobile operating system, Android 5.0 (aka Lollipop). It’s not just about presenting something gorgeous. It’s also been redesigned to be more helpful. The phone anticipates your needs and gets out in front of them, surfacing information before you request it. Not only has the skin of the operating system been juiced for this purpose, but the individual apps too. Calendar and Gmail have been updated, along with many of the key apps, to help you manage the constant flow of information that’s always piping into your device.
But the greatest thing about this phone is the way it handles notifications. They are organized well from the get go, and also delightfully customizable. Imagine you see a Gmail notification that says “11 New Messages.” Drag your finger down a bit on the card, and it expands to show you the subject line of each message. Or if there’s only one message, you can drag down to see the first few sentences, and then opt to delete and move on, or reply, which opens up the app. Or instead, if you hold the notification card down when it appears because it annoys you, you’ll see an an option to click and get info—where you can block notifications from the app entirely, or (conversely) set them as priority notifications.
This special attention being paid to notifications is a current trend in mobile OS interaction design, and Google is a leader here. Increasingly, the notifications screen on our handset is becoming the interface—a primary way of consuming information and talking to the apps on the phone. But Lollipop recognizes that you want different levels of interaction with these notifications at different times, so it offers three modes: all, priority, and none.
All and none are exactly what they sound like, but priority notifications are fantastic. You can, for example, set them so that only calendar reminders and texts or phone calls from your starred contacts break through. Or, you can add Twitter and Facebook notifications to the mix. (Which sounds terrible, but whatever.) The point is you can set up priority notifications mode to be as strict or loose of a gatekeeper as you want.
Material Design is visually stunning. Little animations, like the ripple effect when you touch something on screen or the way info cards expand outward, not only delight, but also give you cues about the actions you are taking.
The phone is self-organizing too. It tries to determine which things you care about most, and raise those to the top. Incoming emails appear above a notification telling you about new stories in The New York Times, for example. The operating system is riddled with these kind of features, designed to get you in and out, so you don’t spend all day staring into your phone.
Yet if you are one of those people who willingly spends a lot of time staring at your phone screen, this one will reward you. Not only has every corner of Android been gussied up to reflect the higher visual standard of Google’s new Material Design principles, but the display on the handset itself is gorgeous. This is where Nexus devices—each generation of which is designed to showcase the new Android version running on it—truly shine. Overall, Material Design is visually stunning. Little animations, like the ripple effect when you touch something on screen or the way info cards expand outward, not only delight, but also give you cues about the actions you are taking. It’s just great to look at.
Photos and video look wonderful. I was genuinely surprised at the level of difference between the Nexus 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, which also has an amazing display but looked a little overbright and washed out by comparison. The Nexus 6 just invites you to dive in and live in its rich hues.
Similarly, the dual front side speakers are boss. I don’t generally condone playing audio right from your phone’s speakers–it’s annoying for you and more so for everyone else–but this actually makes a passable little outdoor sound system. Don’t get me wrong, it still has a certain Motel 6 clock radio quality to it, but it’s completely listenable.
If you are privacy-minded, there are some nice features for you too. You can set certain notifications to keep their details secret when the phone is locked–SMS messages, for example. You can pin an app to the screen so that someone can use that app (say, Netflix) and nothing else without knowing your unlock code. (I used this pretty effectively as child-proofing.) You can set it to remain unlocked in the presence of certain devices like a smart watch, a headset, or even your car. A multi-user mode lets you set up a guest account to give someone else access to your device and even operating system, but not your data. All of these are thoughtful and useful, and I enjoyed all of them.
I took the Nexus 6 with me on Halloween (just like last year with the Nexus 5) where I shot dozens of photos first in daylight, and then into the night. It’s got a 13-megapixel camera and an f/2 lens—a huge improvement over last year’s model. The camera software is better too. It’s significantly more responsive. I was eager to see how it compared.
Photography conditions are difficult on Halloween. And even in those well-lit doorways, there are often lots of people moving around that can make focusing difficult. You’re moving into and out of well-lit doorways and into darkness. The costumes are colorful and filled with small details. It’s a great testing environment. Unlike last year, I came away from the night (and all the time I’ve carried the device) mostly happy with color accuracy, with exposure, and with its ability to focus in most situations. Low light shots taken without a flash were usually good-bordering-on-great, even in those difficult conditions. But the dual-LED backside flash was a nuisance. It’s far too slow to focus and fire, which cost me lots of shots. When it (finally) did fire, everything looked washed out. Turn it off and leave it off.
This device stole a lot of tricks from the Moto X, and I wish it had taken more cues from its fast-firing camera.
What bothered me more than the flash was the speed, though. The camera app takes several seconds to launch and focus, for example, and there’s no built-in burst mode for capturing action. HDR mode is painfully glacial. This device stole a lot of tricks from the Moto X, and I wish it had taken more cues from its fast-firing camera. Although the camera did fine overall on Halloween, afterwards I wished I’d had the iPhone 6 Plus with me. Those pictures are brighter and more detailed. Flash photography looks better, and the camera launches faster—by more than a second if the app is starting cold.
The elephant in the room when discussing the Nexus 6 is its size. 2014 is the year Big Phones broke through. There’s an arms race towards bigness, and the Nexus 6 is the new winner, or maybe loser. While it’s not much bigger than the iPhone 6 Plus on paper—looking at the dimensions, it’s only 3.2 cubic inches larger and weighs just 12 grams more—but you feel that heft. It’s meatier than the Galaxy Note 4, too. I will say that the curved backside makes the Nexus 6 easier to hold than flat-backed big phones. But overall, the extra weight makes it more difficult to use one-handed, especially because it doesn’t have software tricks like the 6 Plus or the Note 4 do for shrinking its screen down for single-hand use.
Battery life is very good. I typically saw about 13 hours or more of normal use—email, social media, web browsing, streaming audio and video, photography, and games—before I would have to charge it. Given its comparative heft, however, I was expecting the battery to be even better.
And here’s something: it’s far more prone to falling out of my pockets than any other phone I’ve ever used. It’s heavier and bulkier, and juts out of back pockets by an inch or more. It’s also relatively easy, when seated, to have its center of gravity tilt out of a front pants pocket. I’ve dropped it a lot. Every day. (I’m hard on phones.) On the upside, other than some very slight dimpling in the aluminum in one of the corners, it isn’t any worse for having been dropped on hardwood floors, masonry, and concrete a dozen or so times.
In every sense of the word, the Nexus 6 is solid. It’s got a truly wonderful operating system, by far the best I’ve ever used. But if Lollipop is a triumph (and it is) the Nexus 6 is basically just a nice win. It’s got great hardware, but not the best of the year in its size category. Mostly, it’s made me very excited about Lollipop—and running it on another device.
