Typically, TechCrunch Cribs goes inside tech companies to show a side of them that cameras don't often see. But this episode took us to the San Francisco office of CreativeLIVE, the online education startup that broadcasts its classrooms live to a worldwide audience -- here, cameras are literally part of the furniture.
With Red Bull[1] poised to wrap up their fourth consecutive world championship the battle to be ‘best of the rest’ is far from settled.
Ferrari, Mercedes and Lotus are vying for second place in the constructors’ championship which brings rich financial rewards as well as prestige.
The extra income would be welcomed by any of the teams but particularly Lotus, who are operating on a considerably smaller budget than their well-heeled rivals.
Further back in the championship Sauber’s resurgence could see them rise as high as fifth. Who will come out on top?
The race to runner-up
Here’s how many points Ferrari, Mercedes and Lotus have scored so far this year:
There’s been little to separate Ferrari from Mercedes in the contest for second place in the championship for the last four races.
Mercedes can usually rely on having better qualifying pace but the Ferraris come one strong in race conditions – as was clear at Singapore. In Japan Lewis Hamilton’s[2] first lap misfortune and Nico Rosberg’s hasty departure from the pits saw Mercedes squander vital points in their battle with Ferrari.
But the last two races saw Lotus take points off both teams which has brought them firmly back into contention for the runner-up spot. There are two main reasons for Lotus’s rise.
The first is the improving form of Romain Grosjean[3], who has out-qualified Kimi Raikkonen more often than not in recent races and led almost half the race in Japan.
Lotus are also suspected of gaining a similar advantage to Red Bull from the mapping of their Renault engine. Mercedes believe Renault have found a way of legally enhancing their car’s traction.
These two factors could prove decisive over the final races. Having lost Raikkonen along with technical figures James Allison and Dirk de Beer to Ferrari, Lotus could be about to have the last laugh this year.
Sauber’s late surge
Here’s how many points McLaren, Force India, Sauber and Toro Rosso have scored so far this year:
Sauber’s[4] return to form will be a cause for sleepless nights at Force India.
The Swiss team is in a similar situation to Lotus – as well as making gains with their car in recent races, their championship situation has been bolstered by the improving form of their second driver.
In their case it is Esteban Gutierrez[5] who scored the first points of his F1 career with a highly credible seventh place at Suzuka, behind team mate Nico Hulkeneerg.
Hulkenberg’s star is also rising. Since missing out on a switch to Ferrari he has produced giant-killing performances in Italy and Korea.
The Hungaroring was a turning point for the team as a new aerodynamic upgrade arrived and coincided with Pirelli’s changes to the tyre construction. Both have clearly been to their benefit, and the latter has clearly disadvantaged Force India, who look set to follow Toro Rosso in being overhauled by Sauber.
McLaren’s hold on fifth place may not be secure, especially if Sauber repeat their Japanese feat of getting both their cars home in front of the silver ones.
Over to you
Who do you think will come out on top in these three-way battles? Cast your votes in the polls below and have your say in the comments.
Who will finish second in the constructors' championship?
Ferrari (33%)
Mercedes (33%)
Lotus (34%)
Someone else (0%)
Total Voters: 268
Who will finish fifth in the constructors' championship?
Just like clockwork, here comes the latest release of Ubuntu: version 13.10 Saucy Salamander. Like April's Raring Ringtail, this update is mostly about fine tuning the things that already make Ubuntu the Linux distro of choice for many out there. Performance has been improved, especially in Unity ...
Soldiers stand next to pieces of a Lao Airlines plane on Thursday after it crashed into the Mekong River near Pakse, Laos.
Pornchai Kittiwongsakul/AFP/Getty Images
Soldiers stand next to pieces of a Lao Airlines plane on Thursday after it crashed into the Mekong River near Pakse, Laos.
Pornchai Kittiwongsakul/AFP/Getty Images
The crash of a turboprop in southern Laos that killed all 49 people aboard was caused by a violent storm that prompted the pilot to miss a runway and careen into the Mekong River, authorities say.
"Upon preparing to land at Pakse Airport the aircraft ran into extreme bad weather conditions and was reportedly crashed into the Mekong River," the Laos Ministry of Public Works and Transport said in a statement.
The Lao Airlines' ATR-72 had 44 passengers aboard. In addition to 17 Lao nationals, the flight included several passengers from France, Australia and Thailand; three from Korea; two from Vietnam; and one person each from the United States, Canada, Malaysia, China and Taiwan. Five crew members were also killed.
The state-run news agency of Laos quoted an eyewitness to the crash as saying that the plane "appeared to be hit by a strong wind, causing its head to ascend and pushing it away from the airport area."
The Bangkok Postreports that one of the plane's propellers, as well as passengers' backpacks and passports, were among the debris in the Mekong River:
" 'So far eight bodies have been found. We don't yet know their nationalities,' said Yakao Lopangkao, director-general of Lao's Department of Civil Aviation, who was at the crash site in Pakse, the main town in the southern Lao province of Champassak. 'We haven't found the plane yet. It is underwater. We're trying to use divers to locate it.'
"He ruled out finding survivors. 'There is no hope. The plane appears to have crashed very hard before entering the water.' "
"Lao Airlines, the national airline of the impoverished and landlocked nation of six million people, operates domestic as well as international services. Its fleet includes six aircraft of the type involved in the crash.
"Paske, the capital of Champasak province, opposite the Thai province of Ubon Ratchathani, is the largest city in southern Laos.
"The area is a popular destination for tourists who visit coffee plantations of the Bolaven Plateau and a former royal principality."
Betterment Acquires ImpulseSave, The App That Encourages You To Save Money Rather Than Spend It
I have something to get off my chest: I live in New Jersey, so by definition that makes me a “Jersey driver”. I’ve never thought of myself as the sort of manically aggressive road warrior that befits the stereotype (and I’d argue that Pennsylvania drivers are way worse), but Y Combinator-backed Automatic’s Link dongle begs to differ. It’s been plugged into my car for the better part of two weeks now, dutifully tracking all my hard stops, all my hasty starts at green lights, and all the times I’ve perhaps pushed the car a bit too hard.
And the verdict is in: I’m exactly what I thought I wasn’t. I’m a stereotypical New Jersey driver. As the old adage goes, the first step to recovering is admitting you have a problem, and Automatic’s neat little dongle + app combo has helped me to realize just that.
Automatic Link Review Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Realtime Driving Feedback
The Rundown
But let’s back up a moment — how does this all work? Let’s back up a moment first. Since 1996, every car that’s been sold in the United States has what’s called an OBD-II port nestled in it somewhere. Odds are good you don’t even know what it looks like (it’s a little trapezoidal thing with 16 pins) or where it is. It’s there so mechanics and car dealers can troubleshoot automotive issues by connecting a computer to the thing, and the Automatic team has whipped up a consumer device that pops in there to monitor your car’s speed, fuel injection rate, and more.
There are a few extra bits in there that make the Link dongle more than your average diagnostics tool. The accelerometer means that it can detect sudden stops and starts, and there’s a tiny speaker built into the that audibly alerts you in those moments.
It sounds like sort of a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Consistently slamming your brakes isn’t doing your car any favors, but the dongle is much more sensitive than that — seemingly normal stops can trigger the alert which sort of forces you to reconsider how normal your driving really is. The dongle also beeps at you when you’re too quick off the line (something I’m apparently guilty of way too often), and when you push your car over 70 miles per hour. In the end, you’re left with a gadget that’s capable of giving you realtime driving feedback while you tool around town (and it’s much more pleasant than having a backseat driver bark at you).
Of course, the (currently iOS-only) app plays a big role in all this too as the Link connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy. You can’t glance down at your phone in-the-moment for immediate status updates — the only feedback you’re getting while driving is those audio notifications — but it dutifully chews on all of that data post-drive to show you your route and how many of those driving faux pas you made on the road. It also displays a rough estimate of your fuel economy, and I do mean rough — some quick, back of the napkin calculations gave me figures that weren’t always as peachy as the ones the app displayed. Automatic says this is a known issue though, and they’re apparently working on improving accuracy.
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All of those metrics get boiled down into a single weekly score so users can easily track their progress over time.
And thankfully, there are some features that I haven’t had to use yet. In the event that your car throws up a Check Engine light, the Automatic app is capable of showing some detailed information about what may be causing it and how to potentially fix it. And if you’ve got Crash Alert enabled, the Link will be on the lookout for the sort of incredibly hard stops that usually signify, well, a crash. In the event it detects one, it collects your location information using your phone’s GPS and attempts to send it along to the local authorities by way of Automatic’s backend servers. It’s exclusive to the U.S. and still very much in beta though — Automatic admits that at this point there’s no guarantee that any nearby police stations or fire departments will respond.
There are, as always, some caveats to be aware of. While years and years worth of cars physically have an OBD-II port somewhere, the Automatic Link can’t decipher the data from every single one of them (you can check your car’s compatibility here).
That crucial Bluetooth connection presents some problems of its own too — if you’re the type of person who relies on Bluetooth to stream your music through your car stereo or access your contact list on the go, you may to have to decide which of these experiences means more to you. Then again, there’s a fair to middling chance that if your car came with Bluetooth functionality out of the gate, it’s already going to replicate some of the Automatic Link’s more basic features.
And you know what? That’s just fine. My car rolled off an assembly line in 2006, which was apparently the model year just before the one when neato options like AUX inputs and in-dash fuel economy gauges became standard fare. A drill and a $15 gewgaw from Amazon fixed that first problem, and now a $99 gadget + app combination have taken care of the latter for me (and then some). On some level though, I just wish the Automatic system did more — I’d love a web view that lets me dig into all this information in aggregate, and some maintenance reminders every few thousand miles since I’m probably running a little behind on that too.
The Verdict
Now this is all well and good, but there’s a bigger question to tackle: am I actually a better driver?
Well, I’m getting there. The thing to remember about Automatic is that it isn’t going to magically make you a more conscientious driver — you have to work at it. The name of the game is behavior modification through better data. In that sense the Automatic dongle is a sort of Fitbit for your car, a reasonably inexpensive doodad that shines a little more light on what you put your car (and your wallet) through on a weekly basis. Exactly what you do with that data is entirely up to you.
In my case, I’ve slowly grown to be a bit more thoughtful on road in the two or so weeks since I first jammed the dongle in my ODB port. That’s not to say that I’ve given up my leadfoot tendencies completely — sometimes you just need to crank things up a bit — but I’m noticeably more cognizant of how fast I’m going at any given moment. It’s even gotten to the point where I finding myself driving as close to 70 MPH as possible without actually going over, even when the Automatic isn’t plugged in.
It’s also not meant to be a replacement for more robust, capable ODB scanners. Needless to say, dyed-in-the-wool car buffs may not find enough value here to warrant a purchase. The same goes for people who are more than happy putting pedals to the metal on a regular basis — chances are they’re not planning to change their behavior very soon. But for cost-conscious consumers? Or people like me who actively want to change their driving style? The Automatic experience is worth the asking price, and with any luck it’ll only get better with time.
Myopia isn’t an infectious disease, but it has reached nearly epidemic proportions in parts of Asia. In Taiwan, for example, the percentage of 7-year-old children suffering from nearsightedness increased from 5.8 percent in 1983 to 21 percent in 2000. An incredible 81 percent of Taiwanese 15-year-olds are myopic. If you think that the consequences of myopia are limited to a lifetime of wearing spectacles—and, let’s be honest, small children look adorable in eyeglasses—you are mistaken. The prevalence of high myopia, an extreme form of the disorder, in Asia has more than doubled since the 1980s, and children who suffer myopia early in life are more likely to progress to high myopia. High myopia is a risk factor for such serious problems as retinal detachment, glaucoma, early-onset cataracts, and blindness.
The explosion of myopia is a serious public health concern, and doctors have struggled to identify the source of the problem. Nearsightedness has a strong element of heritability, but the surge in cases shows that a child’s environment plays a significant role. A variety of risk factors has been linked to the disorder: frequent reading, participation in sports, television watching, protein intake, and depression. When each risk factor was isolated, however, its overall effect on myopia rates seemed to be fairly minimal.
Researchers believe they are now closing in on a primary culprit: too much time indoors. In 2008 orthoptics professor Kathryn Rose found that only 3.3 percent of 6- and 7-year-olds of Chinese descent living in Sydney, Australia, suffered myopia, compared with 29.1 percent of those living in Singapore. The usual suspects, reading and time in front of an electronic screen, couldn’t account for the discrepancy. The Australian cohort read a few more books and spent slightly more time in front of the computer, but the Singaporean children watched a little more television. On the whole, the differences were small and probably canceled each other out. The most glaring difference between the groups was that the Australian kids spent 13.75 hours per week outdoors compared with a rather sad 3.05 hours for the children in Singapore.
Rose, whose research was covered in the magazine Science News, pointed out the vastly different educational cultures that prevail in Sydney and Singapore. Most Australian children participate in one year of part-time preschool, which teaches social skills and communal play more than reading or writing, followed by one year of full-time kindergarten. During the same stage of development, the typical Singaporean child goes through three largely full-time years of education in an attempt to ensure that he or she can read before beginning school. Full-time schooling likely comes at the expense of time spent playing outside.
If the problem is just a matter of light intensity, however, you could send your child outside to read.
Over the past few years, much myopia research has focused on substantiating, quantifying, and explaining the connection between time outdoors and proper ocular development. Dozens of studies have come out, mostly from Asia. Last year a systematic review paper aggregated previous studies and concluded that each hour spent outside per week reduces a child’s chance of developing myopia by 2 percent.
There isn’t yet broad agreement on why the outdoors might protect children from near-sightedness. One hypothesis is that kids focus their gaze on more distant objects in the outdoors, while indoor time is usually spent staring at a computer screen, book, or toy only a couple of feet away. Studies on rhesus monkeys, however, suggest that simple light exposure is the more likely explanation. While myopia is extremely uncommon among nonhuman primates, researchers can easily induce myopia by depriving infant monkeys of normal outdoor lighting levels. (Outdoor lighting is usually about 100 times more intense than what you get inside.) It’s no wonder that the most extreme changes in myopia prevalence over recent decades have occurred in sunny places like Singapore, where the difference between outdoor and indoor light intensity is most extreme.
This is, on the whole, an encouraging finding. If children became myopic due to looking at objects too closely, then we’d be stuck with an unsolvable dilemma: choosing between teaching children to read and protecting their eyesight. Researchers have been worrying about the necessity of this tradeoff for years. In the 1930s scientists observed that myopia was very rare in hunter-gatherer societies, and a 1960s study of native people in Alaska showed that older generations, who had not attended school, were much less likely to have myopia than younger generations, who had. Singaporean studies 20 years ago likewise linked educational attainment to myopia. If the problem is just a matter of light intensity, however, you could send your child outside to read, or purchase high-intensity light sources that mimic outdoor exposure.
The unfortunate part is that parents don’t seem inclined to send their children outside like they used to—or, alternatively, computers, video games, and improved television programming have made the indoors too delightful for a child to resist. According to a 2004 study from the University of Michigan, the average child in 2002 spent exactly half as much time participating in outdoor activities as did children in 1981. While myopia hasn’t yet reached the levels seen in much of Asian, prevalence in the United States is rising quickly. A 2009 study showed that the prevalence of myopia among Americans between the ages of 12 and 54 surged from 25 percent in the early 1970s to 42 percent around the turn of the millennium.
When I was a kid, my parents used to tell me to turn off the television and go outside to enjoy the beautiful weather. Perhaps the new mantra should be: “Go outside, you’re blinding yourself in here.”
Microsoft on Friday shipped a toolkit to block Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) from automatically installing on Windows 7 PCs, a signal that the new browser will release in the next few weeks.
The IE11 Blocker Toolkit is aimed at businesses that want to keep employees on an older edition of IE. Its tools include a script that can be run locally, as well as an administrative template IT administrators can use to block IE11 through Group Policy settings.
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The toolkit blocks automatic upgrading of older editions of Internet Explorer to IE11 on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 through the operating systems' built-in Automatic Update service. Companies that rely on Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) or System Center 2012 do not need the toolkit since they can manage the deployment of IE11 using those tools.
Individuals can also use the toolkit to keep IE11 off their Windows machines without disabling Automatic Updates for all other Microsoft software.
Microsoft has issued similar toolkits for IE7, IE8, IE9 and IE10 before those browsers' public releases. Earlier this year, for example, Microsoft offered a blocking toolkit for IE10 about three weeks prior to the browser's public release.
If Microsoft sticks to the same timetable -- likely, since the idea of the early availability of the toolkit is to give companies time to deploy it -- IE11 will launch near the end of this month or in early November. Microsoft has declined to disclose a ship date for IE11 on Windows 7, saying previously only that it would be this fall.
IE11 on Windows 8.1 will debut sooner: The browser, part of the update to Windows 8, is to land on the Windows Store Thursday, Oct. 17. Current users of Windows 8 and Windows RT can download and install the free Windows 8.1 update -- including IE11 -- that day. Windows 8.1 retail upgrades and systems featuring Windows 8.1 are to launch Oct. 18.
Blocking toolkits, while long crafted by Microsoft, have become more important since early 2012, when the Redmond, Wash. developer began silently upgrading IE to the newest version suitable for a user's version of Windows. Most Windows XP customers, for example, have been upgraded to IE8, while Windows Vista maxed out at IE9 and Windows 7 PCs have, in lieu of a block of one kind or another, been moved to IE10.
Shortly after Microsoft ships the final version of IE11, it will begin pushing the browser to all Windows 7 machines via Automatic Updates. The result will resemble 2013's rapid rise in IE10 adoption. From February through September, IE10's share of all copies of Internet Explorer soared from next to nothing to nearly 34 percent under the forced upgrade from IE9.
Typically, TechCrunch Cribs goes inside tech companies to show a side of them that cameras don't often see. But this episode took us to the San Francisco office of CreativeLIVE, the online education startup that broadcasts its classrooms live to a worldwide audience -- here, cameras are literally part of the furniture. 
Just like clockwork, here comes the latest release of Ubuntu: version 13.10 Saucy Salamander. Like April's Raring Ringtail, this update is mostly about fine tuning the things that already make Ubuntu the Linux distro of choice for many out there. Performance has been improved, especially in Unity ...
