Passive Accident Speak

Lately, my urban planning/transportation enthusiast/etc personality has manifested as a bitter speaker against passive "accident" speak. A couple weeks ago, a woman was driving to work in a suburb of Chicago when she crashed her car into a building a died. The article stated "woman on her way to work dies when her car crashes into building" and in the actual text of the article it never mentioned that she was even driving, just that the car, somehow on it's own I guess, crashed into the building, maybe with the intent to murder her... I'm not really sure. However, today, I discovered a new low in passive accident writing when I saw this article title on the Chicago Tribune website:

In the Tribune's defense, the article itself was not quite as passive, but really "Man leans out car window, killed by parked car" ummm.... I'm not really sure how the parked car decided to kill the man, but, I guess so. Granted, I think the title would be a little long if it said something like "Man leans out car window and was dragged out of said car when driver got close to parked cars and he did not pull himself back in in time for him to hit a parked car on the side of the road" but.. it could have said "killed when hitting a parked car" or something a little bit more related to the fact that the parked car did NOTHING in this whole process, except be parked on the side of the road. Don't get me wrong, I hate parking, and cars kinda in general, but .... it irks me that the responsibility of this crash (not accident!) is placed on the parked car in this title.

And with that, I will end my bitter rant... for now.

R

Should we be paying attention to Google glass?

While Google was worrying about banning the first porn app to be released on Google Glass (before the product is even commercially available), other people are working on something much more important.

An Israeli startup has developed a device to help the visually impaired read, even while walking around on a normal day.  This is not an app for your phone that will read websites or PDFs for you, it is a device that can be clipped to the side of your glasses and reads text that the wearer points to, even from far away.  This video (also in the article I linked to before) shows one of the employees of OrCam, who is visually impaired, demonstrating the device. While Google is working to change the lives of people who are not visually impaired by introducing Glass, this small company is releasing the product (that so far reads English text) for $2500.

This product can inform the user that a traffic light (hopefully they are only pedestrians) is green or red.  It can also be taught to recognize specific products (as shown in the video), and faces of people you know.  That's good for me, I never remember anyone.  And, it will secretly inform you of their name using bone conduction for audio, which this device also uses (sorry that website is kinda freaky, but it has a good explanation).  The OrCam device doesn't use an implant to conduct through the bone, it counts on your glasses holding the device against your head to transmit the audio through your skull.   All of that is beside the point, the exciting part is that I could program it to tell me the person's name and how I know them secretly so I would seem much nicer than I am.  

Anyway, this is pretty exciting technology for the vision science field and for the visually impaired community.

S