Politico: Mass transit takes the lead in connecting up

Big data like this allows TfL to regulate intervals between buses, ending that bane of commuters: long waits followed by clumps of buses. It also helps cut pollution — a key election pledge of Mayor Sadiq Khan. TfL does this by making sure buses keep moving instead of idling in traffic, spewing out CO2. It will soon also tell passengers when the air is particularly bad via onboard screens.

Reed said traffic lights at 2,500 intersections are now equipped with sensors that receive a short-wave signal from an approaching bus. During the 2012 Olympics, London tested a system that kept lights green for traffic in and out of the Olympic village. In all, the city already has more than 7,000 sensors out on roads. [...]

The next stage for traffic light communication is adding the ability to determine how full each bus is, Reed said. This would prioritize packed buses while holding empty ones back to pick up more commuters. TfL is already working on a system that uses onboard cameras to determine how many seats are free for display to boarding passengers; it’s only a matter of time before that data is transmitted too. [...]

Daimler ran a self-driving bus with passengers on a 20-kilometer stretch of road this summer between Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and the city of Haarlem. The key to success was having a dedicated lane reserved for buses, reducing the risk of collision with other traffic.

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The Guardian: Still ticking: The improbable survival of the luxury watch business

And therein lies the mystery of the modern timepiece. These days, no one requires a Swiss watch to tell the time – or a watch from any country. The time displayed on our mobile phones and other digital devices will always be more accurate than the time displayed on even the most skilfully engineered mechanical watch, yet the industry has a visual presence in our lives like few others. The storefronts of the world’s big-money boulevards glow with the lustre of Rolex and Omega; newspapers and magazines appear to be kept in business largely by watch adverts; airports would be empty shells without them. The export value of the Swiss watch trade fell by 3.3% last year, due primarily to a downfall in demand from the east Asia. But it is up 62.9% compared with six years ago. In 2015 the world bought 28.1m Swiss watches valued at 21.5 billion Swiss francs. [...]

But why do we continue to buy these over-engineered and redundant machines? Why do so many people pay so much for an item whose principal function may be bought for so little? And how does the watch industry not only survive in the digital age, but survive well enough to erect a 16,000-litre salt‑water shrine to its continued mastery of an outmoded art? Far beyond the telling of time, watches tell us something about ourselves. And so the answers to these questions lie within our propensity for extreme fantasy, our consumption of dazzling marketing, our unbridled and shameless capacity for ostentation, and our renewed reverence for craftsmanship in a digital world. [...]

But accurate timekeeping has long ago ceased to be the point. And this, with deep irony, is another reason why the global watch industry survives. Once you can afford to spend even entry-level prices for a Patek Philippe or a Hublot, your watch has begun to represent status and one-upmanship. A watch is a statement of achievement, and also of intent. (It is also one of the easiest ways to export money from one country to another.) Something glittery on your wrist says something about your earning power and your taste, much as an expensive car can do; it is not always an attractive trait. It’s a delusion, of course, but the fatter and more complicated and expensive the watch, the more the wearer may assume control of the universe, the still centre of a spinning wheel.

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Al Jazeera: Swaziland and HIV: Redrawing what it means to be a man

"I thought a man was somebody who's got a family, somebody who's got authority, power, that kind of thing," says Lungelo Fakudze, one of the roughly 100,000 orphans in Swaziland, which is home to 1.3 million people.

It is a difficult image to break in Africa's last absolute monarchy, ruled by King Mswati III - who has 15 wives and can pick a new one yearly from thousands of virgins presented to him during an annual ceremony - and which is blighted by the world's highest rates of HIV, TB and intimate partner violence. [...]

The men also stay away from health clinics, which tend to be female-centred, where they could get a diagnosis and treatment. As a result, while more women contract HIV, more men die as a result of it.

"They believe that they should be big and strong and solitary and authoritative. Reasons you're less likely to go to the clinic and get a check-up and seek out medical services until it's too late," says Tom Churchyard, the director of the charity Kwakha Indvodza (KI), which means Building a Man. [...]

Researcher Bekhie Sithole believes that men's withdrawal from healthcare is a result of the "moralising" of HIV and the way that men have been painted as the perpetrators and women as their victims.

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