Dick Tracy, talking into his wristwatch radio, from the 1930’s comic strip. Everett Collection
When he announced the Apple Watch, CEO Tim Cook called it “the most personal device we’ve ever created.” As he paced the stage, a wide grin on his face and a white-strapped Watch on his wrist, he elaborated how that means more than personalized bands and a customizable face. He mentioned “digital touch” and how the Watch will allow people to do more than talk. “These are subtle ways to communicate that technology often inhibits rather than enables,” he said.
The best thing the first version of the Apple Watch will do is act as the world’s most powerful and expensive messaging app. When it launches in April, the Watch won’t be a great fitness device. It won’t have a huge app store. It won’t run for a week or let you leave your phone at home. That may come later, but it won’t be what decides the Watch’s fate. No, the success of the Watch may well come down to things like haptic feedback, and whether you want to share your heartbeat with another person.
Those features may be a lot more powerful than we realize, with lasting importance for Apple and every other gadget maker.
Fitbit is one of a shrinking number of health and fitness companies that hasn’t yet shared its data through HealthKit, Apple’s health and fitness platform. Back in October, the company’s decision to delay integration was explained in a statement saying Fitbit wanted to explore partner options that served not just iOS, but all of its users. It made sense, but it still raised eyebrows. Fitbit, with millions of users who have years of their data stored in their user accounts, perhaps had more to lose than other companies should those users fling their Fitbits aside for a new Apple Watch. Was Fitbit going to take a stand, going head-to-head against Apple in the wearables space?
Lo and behold, in late 2014 Fitbit announced a trio of new fitness wearables, including a smartwatch: the Surge. Billed as a “fitness superwatch,” it tracks the usuals like steps, distance, calories, flights climbed, sleep, and active minutes, as well as continuous heart rate monitoring. It has built-in GPS tracking—something Apple’s watch will lack. The Fitbit also displays bits of information from your phone on its LCD screen: caller ID, app notifications, and music player controls.
But, as Fitbit’s product billing and the Surge’s feature set would suggest, it’s not really a smartwatch. There are no third-party apps. Notifications are limited. More than anything, it’s a souped-up version of the Charge HR wrist band, a Fitbit with an always-on watch face.
The Surge has a monochrome touchscreen display that’s easy to read in regular light or sunshine. When interacting with it, the screen lights up blue, making it even easier to read. There’s a power button on the left side. Two additional buttons on the right side are used for navigation, but most onscreen interactions can be handled with swipes and taps. Touch response is generally swift. A green LED-based heart rate monitor sits on the underside of the watch where it pulses light into your skin to constantly take measurements. There’s also a USB charge port on the bottom, and the battery generally lasts more than three days per charge.
While I’ve had issues with other large screen smartwatches, the dimensions and fit of the Surge is quite comfortable. The face is similar in size to a Pebble, and the band wraps around in a loose wrist-conforming shape. It’s made of the same rubbery, textured material as the smaller Fitbit Charge HR. I like this material, except that it gets grabby when you’re wearing a long sleeved shirt or jacket. I wore the watch close to 24 hours a day, usually only taking it off for showers (it’s water resistant, but not waterproof). If your mattress is hard, you may find the Surge pinches and presses your arm while you’re trying to catch some zzz’s. This happened to me one night in a hotel bed, forcing me to take it off, but otherwise sleeping with the Surge just became habit; I didn’t notice it.
I had a terrible time trying to get the watch to pair with my iPhone 6 in order to relay notifications. I would restart the phone, restart the watch, restart the app. No dice. Apparently, I needed to do these in a specific order, as outlined in Fitbit’s Help forums. Once you’ve got this working (other people seemed to have little to no issue with this), incoming text and call notifications are delivered to your wrist, grabbing your attention with a momentary vibration. You access your recent messages by tapping the upper right button on the watch, and then swipe right or left to navigate through them. It does not relay any other app notifications, though. On one hand, that’s kind of bunk—it might be nice to get Facebook or Instagram notifications, too—but on the other, it limits the notifications you do get on your wrist to ones you’re most likely to want to respond to, and that’s refreshing.
The Surge is less of a direct shot across Apple Watch’s bow and more of a souped-up fitness tracker that provides minimal notifications from your smartphone.
This lack of notification noise means that, for the most part, the Surge feels like more of just a watch. I’d glance at it to check the time, or check my heart rate. Continuous heart rate monitoring is an almost gimmicky attraction. “Oh my god I’m so stressed out right now, what’s my heart rate? I bet it’s like 130. Oh, it’s only 70. OK I guess I’m not that stressed out.” But by wearing it all day, you can get an accurate reading of your true resting heart rate—useful for assessing your overall fitness—as well as more accurate calorie-burn estimates for when you hit the gym or the trails.
For runners, the Surge’s larger display is great for checking real time stats like your distance, time, and your pace. The watch also tracks your run using GPS, so you don’t need to have your smartphone on you to track your session. The watch can monitor around a dozen different activities, including yoga, spinning, weights, golf, kickboxing, and tennis.
I compared the calorie burn report from the Surge to a Garmin paired with a heart rate strap. For me, the Fitbit’s estimates erred on the low side for a spin session. However, this could be due to my high maximum heart rate—as I mentioned in my review of Fitbit’s Charge HR, a device that uses the same flashing LEDs to measure heart rate, a high max HR can cause inconsistent readings.
The Surge did a better job than the Charge HR, picking up some high intensity efforts in the 180 BPM range, but otherwise generally topped out around 160 BPM, a good deal below my actual max heart rate. If you know that your max heart rate is below 170 BPM, you should not have issues with the watch’s beat tracking. If it’s higher, you’re probably better off wearing a heart rate strap during workouts.
Some other features I liked: you can set a silent alarm to remind you to get up and walk around, and your watch to vibrate every hour as a prompt. There are four default watch faces to choose from, and you can switch them using the smartphone app. You can also select which exercise shortcuts you want to swipe through on the touchscreen—like if you’re never, ever going to step onto the elliptical machine, one of the watch’s default activities, you can remove it from the menu.
The person who will get the most out of the Surge is someone who wants the constant fitness tracking Fitbit is known for, and also wants to wear a more traditional digital wristwatch. This gives you both in just one device. The notifications helpful too, but are also lightweight enough that the simplicity of the watch’s experience remains intact.
Maybe this says it best. I began testing the Surge close to a month ago. In the weeks spent on my wrist, it hasn’t transformed the way I communicate with friends or interact with my phone. But it hasn’t ended up abandoned in a drawer, either.
DJ Patil speaks at a conference in San Francisco, California, Nov. 29, 2012. Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
It’s finally official: The White House has named DJ Patil its first ever Chief Data Scientist and Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy.
Yes, that’s a mouthful. Even as an acronym, Patil’s new title is ten letters long: CDCaDCTODT. But the gist is that Patil—who has worked inside several big-name Silicon Valley operations, including LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Skype, and venture capital firm Greylock Partners—will now act as an evangelist for new applications of big data across all areas of government, with a particular focus on healthcare.
President Obama recruited him personally, and Patil will work in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, reporting to US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith.
He joins a growing number of technology executives defecting to Washington to apply their tech smarts to government. Earlier this month, Obama appointed former VMWare executive Tony Scott as the country’s chief information officer, responsible for modernizing and improving the country’s tech tools. And former US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park is leading a Silicon Valley-based effort to recruit top talent to help the federal government to overhaul its IT.
There is arguably no one better suited to help the country better embrace the relatively new discipline of data science than Patil. He is often credited with coining the term. In 2012, he co-authored the Harvard Business Review article that called out “data scientist” as the sexiest job of the 21st century. At the time, he was the data-scientist-in-residence at Greylock Partners, where he shared with me his life’s mantra: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.”
Over the course of two decades of work in the private and public sectors and in academia, Patil has pioneered new ways for institutions to benefit from data. As a doctoral student and faculty member at the University of Maryland, Patil used open datasets to improve weather forecasting. He worked briefly for the Department of Defense, advising on efforts to use social network analysis, for example, to anticipate emerging threats to the United States. Most recently, he was the vice president of product at enterprise software company RelateIQ, which was acquired by Salesforce last July.
Patil is moving his family to Washington where he’ll play a role in helping the United States government maximize its investments in big data and advise on policy issues and technology practices. And like his tech peers, he’ll be recruiting others to the cause. Patil will also be devoting time to the Administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative, which focuses on giving clinicians new tools, knowledge, and therapies to select which treatments will work best for which patients, while protecting patient privacy.
Patil will have more details on his new role tomorrow when he speaks at the Lollapalooza of big data conferences, the Strata +Hadoop World event put on by O’Reilly Media and Cloudera, in San Jose.
DJ Patil speaks at a conference in San Francisco, California, Nov. 29, 2012. Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images
It’s finally official: The White House has named DJ Patil its first ever Chief Data Scientist and Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy.
Yes, that’s a mouthful. Even as an acronym, Patil’s new title is ten letters long: CDCaDCTODT. But the gist is that Patil—who has worked inside several big-name Silicon Valley operations, including LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Skype, and venture capital firm Greylock Partners—will now act as an evangelist for new applications of big data across all areas of government, with a particular focus on healthcare.
President Obama recruited him personally, and Patil will work in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, reporting to US Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith.
He joins a growing number of technology executives defecting to Washington to apply their tech smarts to government. Earlier this month, Obama appointed former VMWare executive Tony Scott as the country’s chief information officer, responsible for modernizing and improving the country’s tech tools. And former US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park is leading a Silicon Valley-based effort to recruit top talent to help the federal government to overhaul its IT.
There is arguably no one better suited to help the country better embrace the relatively new discipline of data science than Patil. He is often credited with coining the term. In 2012, he co-authored the Harvard Business Review article that called out “data scientist” as the sexiest job of the 21st century. At the time, he was the data-scientist-in-residence at Greylock Partners, where he shared with me his life’s mantra: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.”
Over the course of two decades of work in the private and public sectors and in academia, Patil has pioneered new ways for institutions to benefit from data. As a doctoral student and faculty member at the University of Maryland, Patil used open datasets to improve weather forecasting. He worked briefly for the Department of Defense, advising on efforts to use social network analysis, for example, to anticipate emerging threats to the United States. Most recently, he was the vice president of product at enterprise software company RelateIQ, which was acquired by Salesforce last July.
Patil is moving his family to Washington where he’ll play a role in helping the United States government maximize its investments in big data and advise on policy issues and technology practices. And like his tech peers, he’ll be recruiting others to the cause. Patil will also be devoting time to the Administration’s Precision Medicine Initiative, which focuses on giving clinicians new tools, knowledge, and therapies to select which treatments will work best for which patients, while protecting patient privacy.
Patil will have more details on his new role tomorrow when he speaks at the Lollapalooza of big data conferences, the Strata +Hadoop World event put on by O’Reilly Media and Cloudera, in San Jose.
Every year I look back to see how well I looked ahead. During my time at eCollege and then Pearson, I wrote a trend piece every January. What shiny new thing might capture people’s eyes or what big, over-arching concept was top of mind for educators.
Looking back, I think I have about a 75-80% success rate. Not that I can brag too much as over those twelve years I likely spoke to or with about a quarter of a million educators, at all levels. My “premonitions” were much more about following the patterns presented to me as problems, opportunities, or simple exuberance.
So, for example, I called the trend of “MOOC fever” at the right time (although who didn’t?). I also noted the heavy push toward Competency Based Education (CBE) seemingly on target. But, when you hear first -hand from the Department of Education that CBE will be a strategic and dedicated push, it’s not hard to predict a soon-to-follow trend.
With that back drop, what is in store for 2015? After all, last year was no different. Even though my family and I moved to Florida so I could take the position of Chief Innovation Officer at Saint Leo University, I still spoke to or with 25,000 people at various levels of education, from K-12 to HE to researchers to vendors to faculty to admins and politicians in 2014. But what did they say?
The ironic (and pleasant) surprise to me was that the conversations seemed….well, less about the shiny and new and more about effectiveness and execution. I heard less about acquisition and more about integration than I ever have before. I heard less about the sky falling and more about bridge building than in past years. I think I might characterize it with a single word: Breathe.
I believe that 2015 will be a year of pausing to finally stitch some things together better, if not correctly. Education has seen a ton of initiatives, experiments, and products / services that will “revolutionize” the industry over decades. Yet no real revolution has taken place. At least not yet.
At the same time, people have seen some fantastic ideas come and go, not because the ideas weren’t solid, but because implementation was bad. Whether it’s politics (internal or external), technology limitations, or even a lack of appropriate experimentation options, some of the great education ideas of our time just languish in anonymity or make their amazing difference for only a handful of students.
Take learning analytics, coming from “big data” warehouses. In the past 5 years, I’ve read and heard the phrase, “I don’t believe in big data” from people in very high places numerous times. Why? Because the promise of data leading to transformative change of education process (be it teaching & learning, enrollment, retention, etc) missed the mark for so long. Systems would not (or could not) speak to one another; owners of data were miserly and protective; analytic engines weren’t nearly as smart as marketed; etc. So, while we are likely finally at a place to cash in on those bets, we have a problem. The problem is that the gamblers went home years ago.
And data is not the only initiative fall short of its promise. In the 35 conferences I attended in 2014, I heard regularly that OER is just too hard to edit, technology doesn’t change classroom quality as it never gets above the “Substitution” level of Puentedura’s SAMR model (or the ‘R’ of the RATL model, etc), MOOCs are more trouble than they are worth, etc.
And so it seems that 2015 might finally be the year to put together, fix, build up, or otherwise empower education with solutions of old. This is not to say new initiatives or products won’t emerge. People will certainly keep working on CBE, breaking the $10,000 Baccalaureate, and it excites me greatly to see both acceptance of and usage for gamification. And groups will keep financing initiatives that play to their strengths too. (Will LinkedIn, Mozilla, and others finally put ‘badging’ into a mainstream, significant conversation in 2015?) But generally speaking, I think 2015 and likely some of 2016 will be a year to reset. Educational institutions have spent a lot on solutions that have not hit the appropriate ROI levels yet. But many still have promise.
Take technology in the classroom up to the “Modification” or “Redefinition” stage of SAMR – now you have something transformative to look at. Want your “rigor” initiative to work for all – consistent professional development may be the answer. How about a meaningful OER solution – perhaps it’s time to bolster some middleware or change the instructional design in the first place. And on and on…
So, don’t be surprised when you start hearing about some amazing “leaps” forward for our industry in the next couple of years. Once the infrastructure is finally right, some of these initiatives will revolutionize… OK, not that strong. They will markedly improve some of the big issues education has been dealing with for a long, long time.
Good luck and good teaching.
Dr. Jeff Borden is Chief Innovation Officer at Saint Leo University.
Sex in movies is nothing new—and most of the time, it’s at least somewhat pleasant to watch. Imagining the future in movies is also nothing new, and most of the time it too is at least somewhat pleasant to watch. When the two intersect, though, the results aren’t quite so pleasant. Look, we get it; dystopian predictions feel most dire when they prey on our primal impulses, which are sex and…well, sex. But while it’s obvious why sci-fi delights in giving us creepy looks at our carnal future, what’s slightly less clear is why the execution are always so terrible. Don’t believe us? Take a stroll down cinematic memory lane. From VR shenanigans to Shag Roulette to orgies that feel more like crackhouses than saturnalia, filmmakers have made sex terrifying—but not for the reasons they wanted to.
In Roger Vadim’s distant future, pictured above, sex has been reduced to popping a molly and playing London Bridge. (And not that kind of London Bridge, either.) It doesn’t stop here, either; things get even campier toward the end of the movie, when Jane Fonda meets (and overpowers) the “Excessive Machine,” which is a) a player piano mixed with a jacuzzi mixed with a Hitachi Magic Wand and b) probably sitting in someone’s garage right now waiting to be funded by Ickstarter.
Logan’s Run (1976)
Careening toward state-mandated death? Relaxing in your sunken living room and looking for company? Just hit The Circuit and dial up a little love! Don’t worry: having too many teeth is a plus, and horrible attire is absolutely mandatory.
Lawnmower Man (1992)
Yes, we realize that things go horribly awry about two minutes into this. But until things get nightmarish and nonconsensual and brain-scrambling, just concentrate on how gloriously ovewrought everything is. Whether it’s the Tron-style haptic-feedback bodysuits, the full-body gyroscopes, or just the fact Jeff Fahey’s secret freakytime pro move is turning into a sexy dragonfly, it’s a perfect Horrible Sex Scene. 10/10, would cringe at again.
Demolition Man (1993)
What happens when you’re a ’90s cop who finds himself in a future when “fluid transfers” have been outlawed but you still need to communicate your yo-Adrian earthiness? You reach for the greatest collection of sexual euphemisms ever devised, that’s what. Sure, you’ve heard “boning,” but what about “the wild mambo”? What about—wait for it—“the hunka chunka”? WHAT ABOUT THE HUNKA CHUNKA?
Wild Palms (1993)
Okay, yes, this was an ABC miniseries and not a feature film. But we’re willing to overlook that for a few reasons. First, because its pharmaceutically induced erotica essentially rips off the central concept of Digital Underground’s debut album, Sex Packets. Second, because Jim Belushi’s raw magnetism is far too outsized for anything on the small screen. And third, because Jim’s buddy Charles Hallahan hams it up so hard that we have a feeling he chewed the color right off the scenery.
Surrogates (2009)
INT. DAY — SURROGATES SCRIPT MEETING
SCRIPT DOCTOR 1: We’re almost done, but this scene where we’re trying to make sexual pleasure seem illusory and outmoded still isn’t hamfisted enough.
SCRIPT DOCTOR 2: I know! We should make sex seem like a drug.
SCRIPT DOCTOR 1: Dunno, hasn’t that been done before?
SCRIPT DOCTOR 2: Sure, but not this badly!
SCRIPT DOCTOR 1: YOU’RE ON!
Her (2013)
Props to Spike Jonze for creating a world in which a human-OS relationship is not only plausible, but something you root for. And double props for coming up with a plot device that turns the very idea of cybersex inside out: having AI enlist a human to be the corporeal avatar of non-corporeal desire. But doesn’t stop it from being so awkward that you can’t look directly at it.
Kirby and the Rainbow Curse is a great new Wii U game. It also represents Nintendo’s return to touchscreen gaming.
“But Chris,” you might be writing right now if you are the sort of person who comments without reading the story, “Nintendo has been making touchscreen games all this time. In fact, it has touchscreens on both its portable and home consoles.” Indeed it does, but unlike the original Nintendo DS from which both of these designs sprang, the 3DS and Wii U’s hardware designs disincentivize the creation of touchscreen-only gaming.
So in fact, if you look at the history of Nintendo’s games since the launch of 3DS in 2011, we’ve seen very few games like Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, in which the main action of the game is controlled by directly touching the characters or environments. This is ironic, since mobile games, following on the success of the touch interface in the original DS, have now entirely shifted to exactly this sort of direct-touching control while Nintendo has moved away from it.
If you were to create a touchscreen game on the 3DS, you’d be missing out on one of the system’s most striking features, the glasses-free 3-D display. Any game developer would want the main action of the game to take place on the 3-D screen, not the 2-D touchscreen. But this means that touch controls end up relegated to selecting options in menus, or used for more abstract control: For example, you used to interact with the Professor Layton games by directly tapping on the environment. Now, the touchscreen is used as a sort of trackpad-type pointing device to control a cursor on the 3-D screen.
Same thing with the Wii U: Your television screen might not be 3-D, but can you imagine a game console having you play a game in which you never once look at the television? But that’s exactly what Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, available February 20, asks of you. In this game featuring one of Nintendo’s many second-fiddle mascots, you don’t move Kirby around the screen directly. Instead, you use the stylus to draw pathways on the touchscreen, which he rolls along. You can tap Kirby to give him a little acceleration boost, but you can’t control his direction—he goes where gravity and momentum are pointing him, and if you want to manipulate that, all you can do is draw hills, valleys and loops in front of him.
It’s a design that simply could never be pulled off without a touchscreen. Fittingly, it’s the long-awaited sequel to one of the first games that really showed how different and innovative touchscreen gameplay could be on the original Nintendo DS. It was just a hair under 10 years ago that Kirby: Canvas Curse appeared on the then-unproven DS platform. This sequel doesn’t radically differ from the gameplay of the original, but it’s great to have it back. (And it’s worth noting that you can still pop in a Canvas Curse cartridge and play it on your New Nintendo 3DS, 10 years and many hardware iterations later.)
Nintendo
Kirby‘s cutesy, sugary aesthetic hides the fact that it can be a remarkably challenging, even difficult, game. Since you don’t have direct control of Kirby, you can’t just stop him on a dime when he’s heading into danger. You’ve got to be precise with your line-drawing, which can be difficult under pressure. It’s not a strategy game, and it’s not a twitch game either. It occupies an intriguing, unique position somewhere in the middle of the two; you have to plan your moves out a second or two in advance.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Rainbow Curse has a drop-dead gorgeous graphic presentation straight out of a Will Vinton Claymation special. Nintendo’s designers nailed every aspect of the faux-clay style, from the jerky frame-skippy animation to the thumbprinted hand-made look of the character models. Pity that the game’s main player has to spend all of their time looking at the small touchscreen on the Wii U’s controller. If there’s someone else in the room watching the TV as you play, they’ll get the full impact of the beautiful graphics.
Unlike most other Kirby games, our pink protagonist cannot absorb enemies’ special abilities in Rainbow Curse. In lieu of that, there are a few levels in which Kirby is permanently transfigured into a type of transport vehicle (tank, submarine, rocket ship). In this way, Nintendo’s designers explore even more concepts for touch-only gameplay controls. The submarine, for example, doesn’t follow along the lines that you draw—you just tap a location to set a waypoint, and it automatically travels there.
Drawing lines isn’t just to move Kirby along, either. You might have to draw walls to repel enemy fire, divert a waterfall (or a lava flow), or any number of different things. Simple controls give way to more complex actions.
If I have one caveat it is that Kirby is fairly short. I finished it in a few play sessions over the course of one evening and the subsequent day. You can go back and get the collectible doodads you missed out on, but I find myself fairly reluctant to actually do that for a few reasons: The levels themselves are pretty lengthy, and many of them auto-scroll at a fixed pace. So going back in to find hidden treasures would mean 99 percent of my time would be spent doing things I’ve already done, and 1 percent completing the tough little mini-challenges that the collectibles are locked behind.
So you probably won’t spend a whole lot of time playing on the Wii U’s touchscreen. But as a proof of concept, Rainbow Curse works great for me. I don’t even need to look at the TV when the game is this good. It’s a little strange that the best home for touchscreen gameplay is now the Wii U, rather than the 3DS. But I’ll take it where I can get it.
