Features

WASHINGTON — Those odd characters on your e-mails and text messages are about to see more diversity — sending a message that humanity comes in many colours. 

New draft guidelines released last week by the computing industry consortium Unicode offer a broader range of options for emojis, the ideograms used for various visual messages sent online. 

“People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone,” said the latest draft released by Google’s Mark Davis and Apple’s Peter Edberg. 

“The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they are often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (inhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange colour or a silhouette.” 

The new guidelines offer characters “based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale”, a standard used in dermatology.

Emojis were initially developed in Japan but later adopted into global computing standards for use in electronic messages around the world. 

The symbols may include anything from a yellow heart to a lollipop, but many are based on smiley faces. 

The proposed changes still need approval from the Unicode consortium, but if adopted could take effect in mid-2105. 

“Of course, there are many other types of diversity in human appearance besides different skin tones: different hair styles and colour, use of eyeglasses, various kinds of facial hair, different body shapes, different headwear, and so on,” the engineers wrote in the document. 

“It is beyond the scope of Unicode to provide an encoding-based mechanism for representing every aspect of human appearance diversity that emoji users might want to indicate.”

DUBLIN — From robots that chop up your vegetables to detectors that measure how long you sleep, such “smart” appliances are becoming more and more a part of daily life, according to industry players.

Developers at the Dublin Web Summit, one of Europe’s biggest technology conferences, said interlinkage between people, their homes and their devices were opening up new frontiers.

The developers of Everycook, a cooking device that takes in raw material and independently processes it to a finished meal, hope their product will transform healthy eating.

“You go to our app, pick a recipe, get the ingredients, follow the instructions and Everycook does the rest,” founder Maximilian Tornow told AFP.

Boston-based Chris Cicchitelli, founder and CEO of CastleOS, said his system would revolutionise geriatric care, allowing older people to remain out of nursing homes for longer.

“Using motion detectors and sensors connected to a smartphone, you’ll know how active a person is, even how long they have spent in bed.

“You will know if they have fallen and if they do fall, the system can take action based on that, call 911 automatically, even say where in the house the fall took place.”

With 22,000 attendees, the web summit brings together some of the world’s top companies with start-up ideas for a series of lectures and networking events.

One of the focus areas at the web summit was on how people, objects and devices can become connected in what the tech industry is calling the “Internet of Things”.

“We’re trying to connect 99 per cent of things, not only physical things such as street lights but people and even animals to transform lives and improve businesses,” Wei Zou, technical marketing engineer with Cisco, told AFP.

‘Less chaotic’ traffic

Cisco estimates there will be 50 billion Internet-connect “things” in the world by 2020.

The US company’s chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior said one benefit could be the end of traffic congestion when driverless cars become available on demand.

“These cars will also be connected to each other and to traffic lights, meaning the flow of traffic will be far more organised and less chaotic. That’s the dream for the cities at least,” she said.

On a larger scale, Cisco hopes the growth in connectivity will improve medical care by developing systems for hospitals, such as allowing paramedics to feed patient information back automatically while an ambulance is in transit, so hospitals can be prepared.

It also hopes to reduce the demand for resources by allowing patients to connect with doctors remotely.

“Some people with medical conditions do not need to go to the hospital; they can use digital media to provide the doctors with diagnostics remotely and automatically,” Zou said.

One project demonstrated at the summit was “CitySense” in Dublin which monitors pollution through sensors fitted on courier bikes.

“The Internet of things places the citizen at the heart of all technologies,” said Willie Donnelly, director of the Telecommunication Software and Systems Group, a research centre taking part in the initiative.

While tech is big business mainly based in the developed world, a number of tech companies taking part outlined ambitions to revolutionise daily life in the developing world.

A US start-up said it hoped its kinetic energy-generating shoe insole could transform and increase the use of smartphones in areas of the world where there is no access to electricity.

“In the developing world, 1.2 billion people don’t have access to electricity but have mobile technology — that’s a huge problem,” Matt Stanton of Solepower told AFP.

“They use it increasingly for daily critical tasks, healthcare, banking, education. It’s truly integrated into their lives but the power is not widely available to power the devices,” he said.

PARIS — People who work shifts for 10 years or more may suffer loss of memory and brain power, said a study Tuesday that also warned of safety concerns in high-risk jobs.

The effects on brain function can be reversed, the team wrote in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine, but this may take at least five years.

The research is the latest to highlight the dangers of shift work, which disrupts the body’s internal clock and has previously been linked to health problems like ulcers, cardiovascular disease and some cancers.

Yet, little has been known about its potential impact on brain function.

Researchers tested more than 3,000 current or retired workers in a variety of sectors in southern France in 1996, 2001 and 2006 for long- and short-term memory, processing speed and overall cognitive abilities.

About half of the trial subjects, aged either 32, 42, 52 or 62 when they were first tested, had worked shifts — classified as night work or shifts that alternated between morning, afternoon and night.

Comparing the change in test results over time, and between the two groups, the researchers found an association between shift work and “chronic cognitive impairment”.

“The association was stronger for exposure durations exceeding 10 years” of shift work, which they said was equivalent to an additional 6.5 years of age-related decline.

The data also showed that “recovery of cognitive functioning after having left shift work took at least five years”.

The study could not prove conclusively that shift work was the cause of the cognitive decline, said the authors, and though it seemed “highly plausible”, further research was needed.

The findings raised “potentially important safety consequences not only for the individuals concerned, but also for society,” the scientists concluded, pointing to “the increasing number of jobs in high hazard situations that are performed at night”.

“The current findings highlight the importance of maintaining a medical surveillance of shift workers, especially of those who have remained in shift work for 10 years or more.”

Forget about spam and junk e-mail for it is now more or less under control. A worse nuisance is the invasion of online advertising, be it the ads that pop up everywhere on your screen or those that come on your smartphone in various forms and ways. The last four or six months have seen a clear increase of the otherwise old phenomenon.

Take YouTube for instance, for one. Since last August ads are not only “on the side”, but jump right in to pollute a significant size of the lower part of the video are you are watching. There’s always the little “x” you can click in the top right corner to close the ad but you still have to do it. Until another ad pops up again.

The vast majority of applications that you can install on your smartphone, Android models mainly, come free. That is until you realise that the actual price to pay is to allow ads in while you are using the application and that obscure part of the display, distracting you from whatever you may be doing. It is only then that you find that there’s an ad-free version of the same app but for which you have to pay, admittedly a very reasonable price, a nominal $2 to $10 in most cases. 

Let’s not forget Facebook. A couple of days ago I was looking for some software on Amazon. I just checked the specs and the price but didn’t buy. The next day, while I was Facebooking, there was a new window on my page, advertising the very software I was searching the day before on what was another site of course. Given that the product, Antares Autotune software to name it, is not what you would call a common staple that you would see advertised anywhere for the masses, the only explanation was that my browser had let Facebook dig into its cached info and had brought up the ad, linking what I did on Amazon with Facebook. So much going on behind our back!

You can always try to outsmart your web browser but there’s no guarantee things will be better. Many users opt for AdBlocker, a nice little application that plugs in Google Chrome browser. It’s free (genuinely), small and easy to install with Chrome. It does an excellent job at blocking a large number of ads. Unfortunately it blocks them so well that countless websites, which design strongly relies on ads, just won’t open at all once you install and activate AdBlocker. You find yourself deactivating AdBlocker to view these sites.

Do we have the right to complain? After all ads only come on sites that we visit without paying, with free Android applications, etc. Moreover, there are ads everywhere, in every space, on the street, in printed magazines, on TV, in stadiums, and so forth. Why do we hate ads on the Internet so much?

It’s probably because it is not as well regulated as on other traditional media. After all analogue advertising has been around since the beginning of the 20th century and as such is tightly regulated.

Just like many aspects of the Internet that are rather hard to control because of its gigantic global scale, online ads, often but not always, come in insidious, unpleasant ways. This is mainly what consumers dislike.

There’s a huge difference between a clean, discrete window that shows on the side of your screen, elegantly promoting say a watch model, not hiding any part of the information you came here for in the first place, and a treacherous ad that jumps right in the middle of the text you are reading and that says “click here to find the secret to weight loss that your dietician doesn’t want you to know about” and that doesn’t close easily.

There’s no solution for the nuisance now. Especially that thanks to online ads countless interesting sites can exist that otherwise cannot sustain the expense. Now to be able to filter out the unethical and insidious ads, keeping only the nice and clean ones is technically a mission impossible, at least with the current state of technology. Perhaps someone, some genius teenager maybe, one day will come up with an app for that. An ad-free app, of course.

SAN FRANCISCO — Nearly everyone agrees that texting and driving is dangerous. Many people do it anyway.

In an AT&T-sponsored survey of frequent drivers who text daily — regardless of where they are — 98 per cent said they were aware of the dangers of texting behind the wheel. Nonetheless, three quarters of them admitted to texting while driving, despite broad public-service campaigns and laws against it in some states.

Two-thirds said they have read text messages while stopped at a red light or stop sign, while more than a quarter said they have sent texts while driving. More than a quarter of those who texted while driving believed they “can easily do several things at once, even while driving”.

AT&T Inc. released the survey Wednesday as part of an anti-texting-and-driving campaign. AT&T designed the survey with David Greenfield, founder of The Centre for Internet and Technology Addiction and a professor at the University of Connecticut’s School of Medicine.

The survey came as AT&T expanded availability of a free app that silences text message alerts and activates automatically when a person is moving 15 miles per hour or faster. (Passengers can turn it off.) The DriveMode app is coming to iPhones after being previously available on Android and BlackBerry phones for AT&T users only. The iPhone version will be available to customers of competing carriers as well, but some functions will work only on AT&T devices.

The study in May was of cellphone owners ages 16 to 65 who drive almost every day and text at least once a day. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Researchers conducted surveys with people on their cellphones, and it’s possible those who would have picked up on a landline might have different attitudes. It’s also possible attitudes among those who don’t text as often are different. Researchers excluded 343 people because they didn’t text or drive enough to meet the criteria. After those and other exclusions, 1,004 US adults completed the telephone survey.

Greenfield said the survey is the latest to show a discrepancy between people’s attitudes and behaviours.

It found a broad range of reasons why drivers text. Forty-three per cent of the texting drivers said they want to “stay connected” to friends, family and work. Nearly a third did it out of habit.

Among other reasons for texting and driving:

— Twenty-eight per cent said they are worried about missing out of something important if they don’t check their phones right away.

— More than a quarter believes that their driving performance is not affected by texting, and just as many people said they believe that others expect them to respond to texts “right away”.

— Just 6 per cent answered that they are “addicted to texting”, although 14 per cent admitted that they are “anxious” if they don’t respond to a text right away, and 17 per cent feel “a sense of satisfaction” when they can read or respond to a text message.

Reggie Shaw was 19 in 2006 when he caused a car accident while texting, killing two people. Today, he speaks out against texting and driving.

“It’s something I struggle with every day,” he said. “I know that I need to go out and talk to others about it. I don’t want others to make the same mistake I did.”

Shaw does not remember what he was texting about right before the accident. Back then, he said, “being on my phone when I drove was something I did all the time. It was just driving to me. I guess you’d call it ignorance but I never understood that it was dangerous. How could me being on the phone cause a car accident?”

Today, his phone is off when he’s driving. Never in the past eight years since the accident, he says, has he gotten a phone call or text message that was so important that it couldn’t wait until he stopped the car.

Greenfield, who studies the effects of digital technology on the brain, likes to call smartphones “the world’s smallest slot machines” because they affect the brain in similar ways that gambling or drugs can. Dopamine levels increase as you anticipate messages, and that leads to higher levels of pleasure. Getting desirable messages can increase dopamine levels further.

While all distractions can be dangerous, much of the focus has been on texting and driving, Greenfield said, because “it’s ongoing and because there is an anticipatory aspect to it”.

Greenfield said people should not use their phone at all while driving, but acknowledges that this might not be realistic. Apps, public education and laws that ban texting and driving, he said, will all help change people’s behaviour, just as anti-drunken-driving laws and public education campaigns have reduced drunken driving over the past few decades.

I don’t know whether it is to do with my advancing years or lack of wisdom but happy people tire me these days. There is nothing more annoying in the world than to listen to them droning on and on about how delighted they are with their jobs, family, friends, holidays, train travel et al. You name it, and they rush to tell you how and why they are elated with it. 

The constant complainers can be tiresome too don’t get me wrong. Who wants to be party to a litany of complaints that are presented at the drop of a hat? But between the grumblers and the gloaters, I prefer the former variety.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that in the company of moaners one feels better instantly, because you realise that you are not the only one going getting the raw end of the deal, so to speak. Secondly, and more importantly, one can offer them some suggestions from one’s own personal portfolio, which could perhaps better their lot. It gives you a sense of usefulness as well. 

This dual opportunity is lost on the cheerful set because why would anyone want to give them advice? They have no need for it, in fact they don’t have the time to even heed to it because they are so busy being, well, happy. So much of sugary sweetness in their personality, without any sour or spicy side to it, sets my teeth on edge. Sometimes I feel like smacking them just for the heck of it. To see what the reaction would be. 

I do not do it, of course not! It is not nice to be called old and nasty at the same time. But I often wonder if these individuals are in this state of bliss all the time or are there invisible masks that they wear over their faces when they are in the company of others. 

Faultfinders on the other hand, are diligent in finding errors with everything. Not one to stay silent, they are vociferous in bringing it to the notice of the concerned authorities. They fill feedback forms and complaints register with alarming regularity and then keep following up on it. 

Sometimes I like to read their criticism on the travel or hotel websites online. They definitely manage to keep the service industry on their toes and not take the client for granted. A few comments make me laugh out loud where they bemoan the size of the soap that is supplied, the absence of extra pillows or the lack of springiness in the mattress. 

I was at Lake Victoria once. The lodge I was staying in was on the water and the room service menu was also extremely inviting. But the service itself was so disappointing that I was compelled to ask for the complaint form. I filled it up thinking no one would read it in that back of beyond jungle. 

After I got back home, my phone rang. 

“Ma’am you had a bad time at our hotel?” questioned an alien voice. 

“Who is speaking?” I asked. 

“Your breakfast order arrived at dinnertime?” the voice continued. 

“Ahem, well,” I said. 

“Which bit is exaggerated?” the voice cut in rudely. 

“Actually, none of it,” I announced. 

There was a moment’s silence.

“The food will be before time on your next visit, don’t let this be your last supper,” the voice implored.

Did I go back?

SEOUL, South Korea — As Samsung’s smartphone business suffers a dizzying decline, another issue is vexing investors.

Command of one of the world’s most valuable consumer brands will eventually pass to the son of its ailing patriarch whose business abilities remain a mystery despite being elevated two years ago to a top role at the company.

Expectations of a leadership shift at Samsung intensified after the chairman of the flagship company, Samsung Electronics Co., suffered a heart attack in May. Lee Kun-hee, 72, remains hospitalised and has never publicly named his only son, Lee Jae-yong, as heir apparent. But within the financial world and South Korea, where Samsung’s annual sales equal a quarter of the economy, there is little doubt he’ll be the third generation of the Lee family to head the sprawling business.

The 46-year-old was promoted to vice-chairman level in 2012 after joining the company in 1991. His increasing sway comes as Samsung’s rapid success with the smartphone product category pioneered by rival Apple Inc. is undergoing an equally stunning reversal. Earnings from Samsung’s smartphone business began declining this year, undermined by lukewarm sales of the Galaxy S5 smartphone and the competitive onslaught from cheaper Chinese brands.

“There is no information to know the track record of his leadership, his crisis management ability and how he carried out his business vision,” said Park Yoo-kyung of APG Asset Management Asia, a Dutch fund which is a Samsung investor.

“When shareholders approve management during the shareholders meeting, they do not know the most important profile,” said Park.

The little that is known about Lee paints a picture of a privileged and rarified existence. Kim Yong-chul, Samsung’s former top lawyer, who authored a book exposing corruption at Samsung, wrote that Lee had little understanding about the lives of ordinary people and was not embarrassed by that.

A substantial part of his $4.7 billion fortune stems from access to shares in Samsung-affiliated companies before they went public. He has increasingly become a public face of Samsung, meeting people such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook and China’s president Xi Jinping, but has never given an interview.

Samsung declined to comment on his role at the company.

South Korea’s media increasingly attributes big decisions at Samsung Electronics, the crown jewel of the Samsung empire, to Lee. His known business record, however, includes the failure of Samsung’s Internet ventures in 2000. Lee sold his stake to other Samsung affiliates a year later.

Smartphone troubles are the most obvious and immediate challenge for the Harvard-educated Lee. Earnings from Samsung’s mobile business plunged by nearly 75 per cent last quarter as Chinese competitors such as Xiaomi wooed customers in developing nations. But there are other tests facing him.

Founded in 1938 by Lee’s grandfather Lee Byung-chull, Samsung bulked into an empire spanning washing machines to finance and semiconductors during an era when South Korea’s government gave cheap finance to companies in a rush to catch up with Japan and other developed nations. What mattered were results. How they were achieved was less important.

Even today, the group acts in ways that are frowned upon by investors and regulators.

Despite a minority shareholding, family control is maintained through a maze of cross-shareholdings in the 70 companies that make up the group. Neither Lee nor his father is part of the Samsung Electronics board of directors, the group of individuals with legal responsibility for the company’s decisions.

“I think that Lee is aware that he can’t manage the group in the same leadership style as his grandfather or his father,” said Kim Sang-jo, director of Solidarity for Economic Reform, a group that advocates stricter accountability for South Korea’s powerful conglomerates.

“Rather than just meeting up with the Facebook CEO, he should have official rights and responsibility as a registered director at Samsung,” Kim said.

Some attribute Lee’s low profile to South Korea’s culture of filial piety. Out of respect to the family patriarch, Lee may be reluctant to highlight his achievements at Samsung while his father is still at the helm. It also helps explain a puzzling phenomenon to outsiders: reports in the South Korean media extolling Lee’s vague achievements that rely on anonymous company sources.

An indication of change may come from how Lee deals with the legacy of his father’s conviction for embezzlement and tax evasion. He was given a suspended prison sentence and later pardoned.

One of the court’s findings was that Lee Kun-hee ensured his son got rich by issuing him securities in an IT services company, Samsung SDS, at much less than their value, causing losses to other shareholders.

Samsung’s de facto holding company Cheil Industries, which was involved in a similar court case over how Lee Jae-yong became a majority stakeholder, and Samsung SDS are set to go public in coming months. Critics such as Kim say that the big profits Lee will reap should be a reminder of his larger responsibilities.

“He should show social responsibility by implementing an ownership structure and leadership that markets and the public can accept,” said Kim.

Samsung critics say that means turning away from the past. But Lee might still gain inspiration from his father, who famously urged Samsung workers in a 1993 speech to transform the company at its most fundamental levels. “Change everything,” he said, “but wife and children.”

AMMAN — Like the introductory musical improvisation, known as taqsim, which is played at the beginning of a traditional Turkish or Arabic music piece to draw the listener in while holding so much promise, Fusun Caglayan’s works of abstract art lure one into another world — that of limitless imagination.

Riffing on the fluid nature of taqsim, Caglayan takes the music into its visual representation, creating beautiful pieces of acrylic and oil on canvas that have no beginning and no end.

Although a recurrent rose motif is present in her artwork on display at Dar Al Anda Art Gallery — what she describes as “rose taqsim” — each painting opens the door to an endless trail of interpretation.

What may seem at first as blobs of different colours that clash or combine in natural harmony become roses, flower petals, butterflies, faces, silhouettes, or ocean waves, and so much more in the eyes of the viewer.

Her paintings are at once all of these images and none of them, riffing on each viewer’s unique experiences and interpretations, not unlike the inkblots of the Rorschach test.

“My main theme is the juxtaposition of contrasting elements of fragility and violence in a unified whole in… daily life,” Caglayan wrote.

“Today, there is a fragmentation process under way all around the world, because of the loss of the sense of unity that permeates the human condition,” she added.

In “Silver Rose”, splashes of grey and black are spread unevenly on a white background as hints of light pink and deep red dot the painting.

While some of the splashes may be interpreted as the titular rose, the piece offers deeper levels of meaning, going beyond the initial shape of the rose into complex overlapping brush strokes, only to return to the rose on the surface, in a manner similar to the way a taqsim starts with one maqam or mode and evolves beyond it, before returning to its roots at the end.

For the Turkish artist, “Silver Rose” is representative of the collection’s theme.

In “The Rite of Spring”, an explosion of colours bursts out of the canvas, hiding infinite shapes and possibilities, while “The Wave” spells a sense of gloominess with its dark shades of blue and sepia, as its unsettling calmness may be the harbinger of a coming storm.

Caglayan, an art professor, said the musical influence on her work originally started with jazz, a music genre rooted in improvisation, and then moved into taqsim, in a nod to the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western cultures.

“We are looking at Western art and trying to find ourselves,” she said.

The artist, who sees her artworks forming “pieces of an autobiographical story”, said she is influenced by Western abstract art, Eastern calligraphy, and Anatolian traditional art, drawing from the rationalism of the West and the intuitive perception of the East.

In a piece named “Improvisation”, strokes of deep red and grey intertwine, fighting for control over the canvas and dripping trails of colour in their wake as they remain stuck in seemingly perpetual motion.

“The problem with improvisation is sometimes there is no end,” Caglayan told The Jordan Times, adding that it is difficult to decide when a painting is ready.

She said her knowledge of the classical rules of art aided her in finding the right way to end each piece, indicating that even when improvisation is heavily used, rules cannot be totally abandoned.

The exhibition, titled “Taqasim of Silver”, continues through November 25.

VIENNA — Just in time for a weekend devoted to the dead, Vienna’s unashamedly morbid Funeral Museum is now closer to the action: The Austrian capital’s huge Central Cemetery.

In a city with a singular attitude to kicking the bucket — “Death himself must be a Viennese”, one local song says — the “Bestattungsmuseum” was the world’s first of its kind when it first opened in 1967.

This month it reopened, updated for the digital age, in new premises at the Zentralfriedhof, the second-largest cemetery in Europe by surface area. But with some 3 million “inhabitants”, the graveyard is the biggest by number of interred.

The stepped entrance to the subterranean museum takes people literally down into the underworld of undertakers from centuries past, “into the realm of the dead”, museum director Helga Bock told AFP.

Some 250 items are on display, many quite opulent, showing how for the Viennese having a good send-off — or as they say a “schoene Leich” or “beautiful corpse” — is important, no matter what the cost.

“For nobles, and especially the imperial court, funerals were opportunities to demonstrate power. And people adopted these customs, which is why Vienna developed such a specific mourning culture,” Bock said.

The many eerie items include death masks, death notices and various coffins.

But among the more bizarre is a bell that was placed above ground, attached to the corpse by a string, to ring if you were buried alive by mistake — and a special “Herzstichmesser” knife to pierce the heart to make doubly sure you weren’t.

Another curiosity is a reusable wooden coffin with a hinged door underneath instigated in 1784 by Emperor Joseph II in order to save money, but withdrawn a year later.

Totally inappropriate

But unlike at the old museum, visitors can no longer lie in a coffin — some even wanted the lid on — as they used to be able to do once a year during Vienna’s annual Museum Night.

“The management decided... it was totally inappropriate,” Bock said.

The still-operating Central Cemetery itself is a huge draw for visitors, and not just for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day — November 1 and 2 — when thousands of Viennese lay flowers at their relatives’ graves.

Many locals and tourists take the tram there at weekends — “Taking the 71” is a euphemism for dying — to see the tombs of the likes of Beethoven, Brahms and even Austrian pop star Falco, he of “Rock Me Amadeus” fame.

The number buried here is double the current population of Vienna and at 2.5 square kilometres is “half the size of Zurich but twice the fun”, the local saying goes.

Austria is largely Catholic, but the cemetery has sections for Protestants, two for Jews — one partially destroyed by the Nazis — one for Muslims, and another for Buddhists.

There is a special area too for those who bequeath their bodies to science, one for the victims of the Nazis, a section for stillborn babies and another where urns can be buried among tree roots.

Imperial entrails

All in all in Vienna, death is never far away.

Other cemeteries include one for pets, a number of Jewish graveyards, one dating back to the 16th century, and a “cemetery for the nameless” for suicides and cadavers washed up by the Danube River.

The Imperial Crypt in Vienna’s Capuchin Church, meanwhile, was from 1633 the last resting place of Austria’s Habsburg dynasty, containing the bones of 145 royals.

But not all of them. Habsburg tradition dictated that the hearts went into urns in one church, the intestines into copper containers in Vienna’s main cathedral, St Stephen’s, and only what was left to the Capuchin Church.

Visitors can also take guided tours through the catacombs at St Stephen’s and see, together with the Habsburgs’ guts, the bones of some 1,000 Viennese chucked in during a 1735 plague outbreak.

“The Austrians are known for their worship for the dead,” impressed Swiss tourist Benjamin told AFP at the Funeral Museum. “The dead are almost as famous as the living.”

NEW YORK — Hotels don’t want guests to have to linger at the front desk — or even stop by at all.

New programmes are helping speed up the check-in process for busy travellers, or in at least one case, letting them go straight to their rooms by using their smartphone to unlock doors.

The innovations are still being tweaked as hotels scramble to catch up to airlines. Fliers today use their phones to check in, select seats and as a boarding pass. Hotels envision a similar relationship, with guests ultimately ordering poolside drinks via an app.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts on Monday became the first chain to let guests unlock doors with their phones. The feature is available at only 10 Aloft, Element and W hotels but will expand to 140 more properties in those brands by the middle of next year.

Hilton Worldwide is the only other hotel chain to publicly acknowledge plans for mobile room keys — which it plans to roll out at the end of 2015 at some US properties. Hilton won’t say how many hotels will be included, except that the service will be available at four of its brands, Hilton, Waldorf Astoria, Conrad and Canopy.

“Guests want this because it makes their lives simpler,” says Mark Vondrasek, who oversees the loyalty programme and digital initiatives for Starwood. “The ability to go right to your room, gives them back time.”

Other hotel companies are finding other ways to streamline the arrival process.

Marriott International launched the ability to check in through its app at 330 North American hotels last year. By the end of this year, the programme will be live at all 4,000 hotels worldwide. When a room becomes available, a message is sent to the guest’s phone. Traditional room keys are pre-programmed and waiting at the front desk. A special express line allows guests to bypass crowds, flash their IDs and get keys.

At Hilton, all 4,000 properties worldwide will have a similar check-in by the end of the year. The one added feature: Guests can use maps on the app to select a specific room.

InterContinental Hotels Group is testing express check-in at 60 hotels.

The services are geared toward road warriors who don’t want to slow down, even for a second. Guests who like personal interaction can still opt for a more leisurely check-in, and hotel companies say the move isn’t about cutting jobs.

“If you’re at the end of a long day, you might want a little less of a chatty experience. But if you’re showing up at a new resort, you may want to know what the pool hours are,” says Brett Cowell, vice president of information technology for Hyatt, which is testing permanent keys for frequent guests at six hotels.

The push isn’t just about avoiding frustrating check-in lines. Hotels are trying to get more travellers comfortable using their mobile apps to interact. In some cases, that means using an iPad to request a wakeup call. But ultimately hotels would like to see people purchasing suite upgrades, spa treatments and room service though their phones and tablets — and at some point wearable devices like smartwatches.

Marriott guests made $1.25 billion in bookings last year through its mobile app, according to George Corbin, senior vice president of digital for the company.

Switching to smartphone room keys won’t be easy. Starwood’s app communicates using a Bluetooth data connection. Each hotel room needs to have a new lock that can communicate with phones.

The top 15 hotel companies have more than 42,000 properties worldwide with a combined 5.2 million rooms, according to travel research firms STR and STR Global. Many hotels have made updates over the past few years, but they remain the minority.

Then there is the issue of security. If there is knock on the door late at night and a guest goes to the peephole to see who is there, nobody wants the phone in their pocket to accidentally unlock the door. That’s why Starwood requires the phone to actually touch a pad on the outside of the door to open it.

Finally, only one phone can be linked to a room at a time. So if two people are staying in the room, they still need to get a traditional key for the second traveller.

Marriott says it is holding off on smartphone keys until all the potential bugs can be resolved.

“If there was ever a moment that matters,” Corbin says, “it’s the moment when you go up to your door and the key doesn’t work.”

But for the frequent business traveller, this might just be the time-saver they are looking for.

Bruce Craven spends about 100 nights a year on the road, travelling between his California home and New York where he does executive training programmes and teaches at Columbia Business School. He’s been testing Starwood’s smartphone room key since March.

“If you’re travelling all the time, little things can take on a symbolic importance,” Craven says. “This is one less thing that I need to think about.”