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NEW YORK — More hospitals and doctors are starting to use data from fitness trackers and health apps to help treat patients. But they are moving cautiously. The technology has a lot of potential, but there are key challenges to work out:

Liability

What if a patient’s data shows signs of an ailment, but no one notices? That’s the chief reason Hackensack University Medical Centre in New Jersey is starting with only six patients and three doctors and is monitoring mainly lifestyle data, such as nutrition. It wants to add blood pressure, heart rate and other vital signs to its monitoring, but a hospital committee needs to sign off first.

Doctors say that many patients already bring health data to visits, often as printouts that an office must then scan in. Getting data electronically through Apple’s HealthKit and similar technologies would give doctors and nurses more options to see charts and look for patterns. Ultimately, Hackensack and other hospitals envision setting up a specific person or team to review incoming data. Software alerts could be triggered when a measure falls outside the ideal range, and a nurse or technician would check for accuracy and refer unusual cases to doctors.

Is data reliable? 

Many consumer devices such as fitness trackers aren’t regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, so how much should doctors rely on them? The Centre for Digital Health Innovation at the University of California, San Francisco, is studying this in a partnership with Samsung. One way to test involves strapping a device, on 100 individuals and measuring them as they stand, sit, exercise and sleep. Readings would be compared with those from devices known to be reliable.

“Just because it works in a lab on a couple of individuals doesn’t necessarily means it works on a broad variety of individuals in real life,” said Michael Blum, the centre’s director.

Privacy and security concerns

Data entered into a healthcare provider’s electronics record system is covered by strict federal privacy laws, which subject providers to penalties for breaches. But if you’ve signed waivers as part of insurance claims, your insurer can get the data, too. Nicolas P. Terry, director of the Hall Centre for Law and Health at Indiana University, isn’t too concerned about that, though. 

Health privacy laws don’t extend to technology companies that make trackers and apps, however. The companies might be subject to penalties if they fail to abide by their own privacy policies. But if they never promise to safeguard the information, they are free to share and sell it, Terry said.

The concerns exist regardless of whether a doctor is using the information for patient care. Although a step counter might seem innocuous, it also might record the location of your step.

“Now you have a surveillance system,” Terry said. “If the people you meet also have wearable devices, we could figure out who you meet.” He says data companies might also build health scores that potential employers and life insurance companies would love to have.

Do I get paid for this time? 

Historically, doctors are paid for office visits and procedures. Medicare and private insurers are starting to reward doctors for preventative care, however. With the Medicare programme, for instance, doctors are given a set monthly fee to keep patients healthy. That could involve reviewing fitness data and checking on patients regularly by phone to identify problems that might otherwise result in more costly treatments or visits.

“It is slowly changing...but it’s still challenging to get paid for analysis and for e-mail and phone call time,” said Dr John Schumann, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, internist who blogs on health issues at GlassHospital.

Other limitations

These devices and apps do little to ensure that patients take the medicines they’re supposed to. There are companies developing sensors to record when you pick up a bottle, but for now, doctors have to trust their patients.

Doctors also need to ensure that they aren’t getting data only from younger patients who are already highly motivated and aware about their health.

“What we need is data for older people, and they are not doing that right now, with rare, rare exceptions,” said Dr David J. Cook, who is leading research at the Mayo Clinic into how trackers and apps can improve care. Because hip-replacement patients that Mayo wants to track tend to be older, Mayo has had to loan them Fitbit trackers and $60 Android phones.

Neither Fitbit nor Android works with Apple’s HealthKit, so programmers at Mayo had to write code to integrate those devices. HealthKit should make future integrations easier at Mayo and elsewhere, but there will always be some devices and apps excluded.

It’s the dress that’s beating the Internet black and blue. Or should that be gold and white?

Friends and co-workers worldwide are debating the true hues of a royal blue dress with black lace that, to many an eye, transforms in one photograph into gold and white. Experts are calling the photo a one-in-a-million shot that perfectly captures how people’s brains perceive colour and process contrast in dramatically different ways.

“This photo provides the best test I’ve ever seen for how the process of colour correction works in the brain’,” said Daniel Hardiman-McCartney, the clinical adviser to Britain’s College of Optometrists. “I’ve never seen a photo like before where so many people look at the same photo and see two sets of such dramatically different colours.”

The photo, taken earlier this month before a wedding on the remote Scottish island of Colonsay, also illustrates the dynamics of a perfect social-media storm. Guests at the wedding could not understand why, in one photo of the dress being worn by the mother of the bride, the clearly blue and black-striped garment transformed into gold and white. But only in that single photo, and only for around half of the viewers.

The debate spread from the wedding to the Internet, initially from friend to perplexed friend on Facebook.

One such wedding guest, musician and singer Caitlin McNeill, posted the photo Thursday night to her Tumblr account with the question: “Guys please help me. Is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the [expletive] out.” She’s consistently seen gold.

One of her friends, Alana MacInnes, saw gold and white for the first hour, then black and blue.

Buzzfeed sensed clickbait heaven and, amid its own newsroom argument, was among the first to call McNeill. It posted more than a half-dozen stories on the image and the tsunami of reaction.

On Twitter, #TheDress and variants surged to the top of trending lists globally within hours.

The entertainment elite then chimed in.

Taylor Swift saw the dress was “obviously” blue and black. “What’s the matter with u guys, it’s white and gold,” countered Julianne Moore. Kim Kardashian, never one to miss a trending topic, reported she was seeing gold but to husband Kanye West, it was solidly black and blue. “Who is colour blind?” Kardashian asked the twitterati.

The answer, says Hardiman-McCartney, is that every viewer seeing either set of colours is right.

He says the exceptional bar-code style of the dress, combined with the strongly yellow-toned backlighting in the one photo, provides the brain a rare chance to “choose” which of the dress’ two primary colours should be seen in detail.

Those who subconsciously seek detail in the many horizontal black lines convert them to a golden hue, so the blue disappears into a blown-out white, he said.

Others whose brains focus on the blue part of the dress see the photo as the black-and-blue reality.

“There’s no correct way to perceive this photograph. It sits right on the cusp, or balance, of how we perceive the colour of a subject versus the surrounding area,” he said. “And this colour consistency illusion that we’re experiencing doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your eyes. It just shows how your brain chooses to see the image, to process this luminescence confusion.”

The photo produced a deluge of media calls Friday to the Tumblr reporter, 21-year-old McNeill, who calls the seemingly endless phone calls “more than I’ve received in the entirety of the rest of my life combined.” She says the photographer, who is also the mother of the bride, never wanted the publicity.

There’s one clear winner: English dress retailer Roman Originals, which has reported a million hits on its sales site in the first 18 hours following the photo’s worldwide distribution.

“I can officially say that this dress is royal blue with black lace trimming,” said Michele Bastock, design director at Roman Originals.

She said staff members had no idea that the dress, when shot in that singularly peculiar light, might be perceived in a totally different colour scheme. Not until Friday anyway, when they arrived at work to field hundreds of e-mails, calls and social media posts. They, too, split almost 50-50 on the photo’s true colours.

All agreed, however, the dress for the Birmingham, England-based retailer was likely to become their greatest-ever seller. The chain’s website Friday headlined its product as “#TheDress now back in stock — debate now.”

“Straightaway we went to the computers and had a look. And some members of the team saw ivory and gold. I see a royal blue all the time,” she said. “It’s an enigma... but we are grateful.”

LOS ANGELES — Leonard Nimoy didn’t just leave a lasting impression on the science-fiction world, he also left his mark on science itself.

Seth Shostak, who researches the possibility of real-world extraterrestrial life as the senior astronomer at SETI Research, recalled that Nimoy was regularly willing to lend the organisation a helping hand. When he was asked to narrate a planetarium introduction or appear as a guest at an event, Nimoy did so graciously and never charged.

“That struck me then, and it strikes me now,” said Shostak. “If you play a famous alien, you might have little interest in how science is searching for real aliens, but Nimoy was actually interested in the science — and he was always willing to help us out.”

Remembrances poured in from beyond the entertainment spectrum after news spread Friday about the death of the 83-year-old actor, who played the half-alien, half-human Spock in “Star Trek” films, TV shows and video games. NASA, Virgin Galactic, Intel and Google all sent messages, as did other groups motivated by Nimoy and his role as the truth seeking science officer.

“Leonard Nimoy was an inspiration to multiple generations of engineers, scientists, astronauts and other space explorers,” said NASA administrator Charles Bolden. “As Mr Spock, he made science and technology important to the story, while never failing to show, by example, that it is the people around us who matter most.”

NASA posted a photo online taken in 1976 of Nimoy and his “Trek” cast mates in front of NASA’s real-life space shuttle Enterprise, parked outside the agency’s manufacturing facilities in Palmdale, California.

Samantha Cristoforetti, an Italian astronaut aboard the International Space Station, similarly tweeted her condolences from space.

“Live Long and Prosper, Mr. #Spock!” she wrote.

Don Lincoln, a senior physicist at Fermilab, said he was inspired to go into science not just because Nimoy’s portrayal of the logical Mr Spock but also because of “In Search of...”, the curious 1970s TV series hosted by Nimoy that was dedicated to mysterious phenomena.

“Despite the fact he worked in fiction, anyone who can inspire that many people to look into the sky and wonder has done something really important for mankind,” he said.

Lincoln noted that “Trek” and the character of Spock, armed with his Vulcan nerve pinch and phase set to stun, provided the world with a dynamic look at someone interested in science.

“The fact is that Spock was a cool geek,” said Lincoln. “Scientists are not always portrayed as being very strong. Usually, they’re the guy with the tape on their glasses and their pants too high. He was clearly a person who had desirable components beyond just being smart.”

Nimoy’s commitment to astronomy frequently warped from beyond the Alpha Quadrant and into the real world. He and his wife, Susan, donated $1 million to the renovation of the iconic Griffith Park observatory complex overlooking Los Angeles. The observatory’s theatre is named after Nimoy.

“Mr Nimoy was committed to people, community and the enlarged perspective conferred by science, the arts and the places where they meet,” the observatory said in a statement. “The theatre honours Nimoy’s expansive and inclusive approach to public astronomy and artful inspiration.”

The actor, director and photographer narrated several films focusing on astronomy, including a 2012 short film about NASA’s Dawn mission and the 1994 IMAX documentary film “Destiny in Space”.

“All I can say is if and when we pick up a signal, it’ll be wonderful if the real aliens are half as appealing as Mr Nimoy was as Spock,” said Shostak of SETI Research.

Everybody craves apps nowadays. The name alone is catchy and sounds so much more attractive than passé terms such as application, programme or software. Beyond the appeal of the name, however, lies an ocean of risks. Not everyone is aware of what apps can do to their mobile device, especially those that come free — by far the largest number.

I am not against apps; quite the opposite actually. I have about 30 of them on my smartphone and tablet and regularly use at least 10 of these very useful tools on a daily basis, intensively. The trick about apps is being aware of what they do in the background, how they can affect the performance of your device, how much of your data and files they access without you even realising it, and how much of “you” they reveal to the outside world. Only then you can control them and make them more useful than annoying.

One of the annoyances of having free apps was advertising. Whereas this is still not fun, it is not much of a risk for pop up advertising is something that you see, that is not hidden. So at least you know what’s going on, even if the unpleasant ads pop up unexpectedly, hide part of your screen and appear at the worst moment. This is annoyance but not hazard. Besides, most free apps propose an ad-free paid version.

One of the worst aspects of apps is the work they do in the background, like for instance running silently and issuing notifications of all kinds. This eats substantial technical resources from your mobile device, reducing speed and performance by occupying memory, grabbing processor power and consuming bandwidth, whether wifi or 3G/4G. You don’t know it until you see the notification that you never asked for in the first place. Games do it all the time.

To stop the notification you have (if you know how) to look for the application manager, locate the culprit app and then uncheck the notification selector. A selector that should have been unchecked by default, but this is not how the game designer wanted it to be! With apps, at least the cheap and poorly designed, it’s like being guilty until proven innocent.

Wrong information is one of the downsides of apps. Take TrueCaller (TC) for instance, that otherwise wonderful app that lets you find out the name of the anonymous person who called you from their mobile phone even if it is not listed in the provider’s directory.

A friend wanted to look up the number who called him and used TC for that. Unfortunately the name that was returned by the app was not the right one. Indeed, TC works by gathering information from the contacts list of all those who install it, making this huge database its own. Therefore any erroneous information in anyone’s contacts will be passed on to the others, without any verification for validity! With an app like TC you sometime get wrong information and in all cases your entire contacts information is shared with all those who have the app installed.

Paid apps present fewer risks and in general behave a little more politely. But they all do something to your mobile device. I had to fight to stop the legitimate S-Health app that came pre-installed in my Android. I never noticed it until it displayed without being asked the number of steps I had walked and the distance I had covered one fine day! I managed to stop the app but could not uninstall it for it is “bound” to my smartphone. At least I was able to stop the memory bleeding and return some power to the phone set.

Most apps, when you install them for the first time, have the legal obligation to display a list of the risks associated with them, what they can do to your device, how much info they read from it (like your entire contacts, again) and so forth. Because of the speed at which we all work and use mobile devices few of us have the time or the patience to go through all the details, not everyone would understand them anyway, and we all end up quickly, gladly clicking the “I accept all the terms” button. Et voilà — that’s how it is.

SAN FRANCISCO  — How many remotes does it take to watch television, stream Netflix or record your favourite show on DVR?

The Ray Super Remote wants to declutter your coffee table and become the central nervous system of all of your home entertainment systems. The touch-screen device, released Tuesday, is designed to control TVs, cable boxes, DVRs, video game consoles and Internet streaming players such as Roku and Apple TV. What’s more, it runs on software that learns viewers’ preferences so it can list programmes suited to personal interests.

“As we looked at ways to reimagine TV, it seemed like the remote control needed the most help,” says David Skokna, CEO of New York-based Ray Enterprises. “We think we have a big opportunity to do something magical.”

Priced at $199, the remote won’t be released until May or June, but pre-orders are being accepted online at http://www.ray.co. It requires a Wi-Fi system and pay-TV boxes to work properly.

This isn’t the first attempt to build a smarter remote control. Logitech and a few other electronics companies have been making universal remote controls for years. More recently, a variety of mobile apps have been offering ways to turn smartphones and tablets into multipurpose remote controls.

After nearly three years developing his device, Skokna is counting on the Ray remote’s versatility and intelligence to stand out from the other options on the market.

The Ray remote controls more than 200,000 devices and can run applications that will enable it to control other Internet-connected home appliances, such as Google’s Nest thermostat. The search and recommendation features are set up to eliminate the need to spend a lot of time looking for content. Users can tell the remote what kinds of programming interests them, such as football or comedy, so shows fitting those categories are automatically highlighted on the nearly 5-inch screen.

The remote’s battery lasts for about 10 days and can be easily recharged in a power station that doubles as a holding tray.

The biggest question facing the Ray remote may be this; How many people are so frustrated with juggling multiple remote controls that they will be willing to spend more money on another device?

MIAMI — With peanut allergies on the rise worldwide, a study Monday found that contrary to previous advice, feeding foods containing peanuts to babies before 11 months of age may help prevent allergies.

The findings in the New England Journal of Medicine are based on a British study of 640 children, aged 4 months to 11 months, who were considered at high risk of becoming allergic to peanuts either because of a pre-existing egg allergy or eczema, which can be linked to peanut allergy.

Researchers at Evelina London Children’s Hospital randomised the children into two groups — some were fed foods containing pureed peanuts and others were told to avoid peanuts until they turned five — to see if avoiding peanuts was really the best way to prevent peanut allergy.

They found that by age five, fewer than 1 per cent of the children who ate food containing peanuts three or more times each week developed a peanut allergy, compared to 17.3 per cent in the group that avoided peanuts entirely.

The final results did not include 13 out of 319 randomised children who were excused after showing signs of peanut allergy early in the study.

The children involved in the research were also not fed whole peanuts, which can be a choking hazard.

“This is an important clinical development and contravenes previous guidelines,” said Gideon Lack, head of the Paediatric Allergy Department at King’s College London, who led the LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) study.

“Whilst these were withdrawn in 2008 in the UK and US, our study suggests that new guidelines may be needed to reduce the rate of peanut allergy in our children,” added Lack, who presented the findings at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology meeting in Houston, Texas.

Lack urged parents of babies and young children with eczema or egg allergies to consult with their paediatrician about the possibility of trying to introduce peanuts into their children’s diet.

Rising worldwide

Some experts said the study points to a new way of reducing peanut allergies, which have more than doubled in the last 10 years in Britain and North America.

“We have always been suspicious of a possible increased incidence of allergy to peanuts, and perhaps other foods, due to a delayed introduction of those foods usually occurring after the age of three,” said Paul Lang, a paediatric allergist at North Shore Allergy and Asthma Institute in New York, who was not involved in the study.

“This study points to a possible earlier introduction of food to decrease the ability to become allergic to those foods.”

An allergy to peanuts can develop early in life. It is rarely outgrown and can be fatal.

About 1 in 50 school age children in Britain are allergic to peanuts. The condition is estimated to affect 1 to 3 per cent of children in the developed world. Incidence is also rising in Asia and Africa.

Further work, known as the LEAP-On study, aims to research whether the same effects could be maintained if the children stopped eating peanuts for 12 months.

“Although there are still many unanswered questions about natural history of peanut and other food allergies, this study provides new valuable practical information,” said Blanka Kaplan, paediatric allergist at Cohen Children’s Medical Centre in New York. Kaplan was not involved in the study.

“It underscores the benefits of early peanut introduction and harm of unnecessary delay of peanut consumption in infants with risk for
allergic diseases.”

Someone once told me that at every party there are two kinds of people. There are those who want to stay on till the very end, and the ones that want to go home right after dinner. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other. 

My advancing years have given me a relevant excuse for forgetting the names of people within the first few minutes of being introduced to them. Old age has its advantages, for sure. But the coincidence is, where savers and throwers are concerned, they are also generally bound in the same web of holy matrimony. So, if one partner is an accumulator, the other is most likely to be, for want of a better term, a donor. 

The hoarders like to hoard stuff. Whether it is old clothes, paper bags, plastic wrappers or nylon rope, any item of use or misuse, has to be collected and stored. One never knows when it can come in handy, is the motto they live by. The dispensers on the other hand, give away paraphernalia at the drop of a hat. Sometimes they do not even wait for that because they have gifted the proverbial fedora as well.

In my household, we have our work cut out to perfection. While one of us does the gathering, the other contributes to the scattering. Being slightly unfaithful to my tribe of sisters — the happy homemaker type of housewives who believe in collecting, I like to do the distributing. Too much of stored stuff gives me the heebie-jeebies and seeing a pile of empty shoeboxes can make me break out in hives. Believe me, it’s true. 

The minute I unpack anything, the packaging goes into the dustbin. Gentlemen’s shirts, especially the formal ones, have so much of unnecessary cardboard and plastic around it anyway. There are also those drawing pins that keep the cuff in place and pulling them out can give one bloody fingers. 

In fact, I have an unwritten rule that if I buy four sets of anything new, whether it is slippers, shawls or outfits, I give away four old ones to the nearest charity. My wardrobe, therefore, contains the same number of clothes at any given time. Well, more or less. On very rare occasions I relent and keep a treasured bit of clothing for marginally longer but if I have not worn it for 10 months at a stretch, it goes into the charity basket. Instantly! 

Like in most happy marriages, my husband does not agree with me. He meticulously stashes things and saves them for a particular rainy day. When that one might arrive unexpectedly and surprise us no one knows. 

I was eyeing his oldest tattered T-shirt for the last five years. It was more than 15 years old, faded, and had misshapen arms and large oil stain that no amount of scrubbing could remove. I was waiting for him to go out of town so that I could give it away. Last week, I finally got rid of it. 

“Have you seen my navy T?” my spouse asked the minute he got back. 

“Nope,” I mumbled. 

“I want to wear it,” he announced. 

“Marhaba!” greeted Ahmed, our gardener. 

“Is that my shirt?” my husband was aghast. 

“This one is light blue,” I corrected him. 

“It was dark indigo,” he said. 

“Yes to start off with,” I agreed. 

“And now?” he asked. 

“Now it’s with its new owner,” I smiled. 

PARIS — A great-great grandfather of the hippopotamus likely swam from Asia to Africa some 35 million years ago, long before the arrival of the lion, rhino, zebra and giraffe, researchers said Tuesday.

Analysis of a previously unknown, long-extinct relative also confirmed that cetaceans — the group to which whales, dolphins and porpoises belong — are in fact the hippo’s closest living cousins.

“The origins of the hippopotamus have been a mystery until now,” Fabrice Lihoreau, a palaeontologist at France’s University of Montpellier and co-author of the study, told AFP.

“Now we can say that hippos came from anthracotheres” — an extinct group of plant-eating, semi-aquatic mammals with even-toed hooves.

Until now, the oldest known fossil of a hippo ancestor dated from about 20 million years ago, while cetacean remains aged 53 million years have been found.

Scientists had long lumped hippos with the Suidae family of pigs based on palaeontological finds, but DNA later suggested they were the kin of whales instead.

Yet the huge age gap between hippos and cetaceans in the fossil record has left the experts stumped.

“It meant that either we have never found ancestors of hippos, or we didn’t recognise them among the mammal fossils we already had,” said Lihoreau.

Now the remains of a 28-million-year-old animal discovered in Kenya has provided an important piece of the puzzle, according to a study in the journal Nature Communications.

Named Epirigenys lokonensis (“epiri” means hippo in the Turkana language and Lokone after the discovery site), it was about the size of a sheep, weighing in at 100 kilogrammes, which is about a 20th the size of today’s “common hippopotamus”, a sub-Saharan giant.

It may have spent much of its time immersed in water.

E. lokonensis was not a direct forefather of today’s hippo, belonging instead to a side branch.

But it lived much closer in time to the ancestor from which they both branched off, thus allowing for inferences to be drawn about the ancient animal.

Dental analysis led the team to conclude that E. lokonensis and the hippo both came from an anthracothere forefather, which migrated from Asia to Africa about 35 million years go.

As Africa was then an island surrounded by water, it likely swam there.

All this means the ancestors of hippos “were among the first large mammals to colonise the African continent, long before those of any of the large carnivores, giraffes or bovines”, all of which arrived only about 18 million years ago, said a statement.

The modern-day hippo thus evolved independently in Africa, and is a creature truly endemic to the continent, according to the research paper.

“We filled a gap in the evolutionary history of the hippo, bringing us closer to the point of divergence from their modern-day sister group of cetaceans,” and thus a more accurate reconstruction, said Lihoreau.

NEW YORK — Is the future of the US car industry in Silicon Valley?

After Tesla and Google, Apple appears to be readying for a plunge into the industry long rooted far away in the steel belt of the US upper Midwest.

According to various media reports, the maker of iPhones and iPads has created a special unit baptised “Titan” with hundreds of staff to begin developing an electric car, with 2020 the target date.

Apple remains silent on the project, but the reports were partially backed up by a lawsuit filed against the tech giant. Battery maker 123 Systems has accused Apple of aggressively poaching its staff.

But it puts Apple in line with Tesla, the current champion of the electric car, and Google, the online giant which is focused on the self-driving, also electric Google Car.

The Big Three US automakers — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler (now a part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, FCA) — are taking the threat from the Detroit outsiders seriously.

“Given the company’s [Apple’s] tremendous capabilities, that is no surprise to anyone,” GM spokesman Dan Flores told AFP.

At Chrysler, spokesman Eric Maynes said: “We can’t comment on something we haven’t seen.”

Ford too had no comment on Apple’s plans, but the number two automaker recently opened a research centre in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, as it looks to the future of self-driving automobiles.

Bill Visnic, an analyst at industry specialist Edmunds.com, said that given the seven-year average time frame to develop and bring a car to the mass market, the Detroit giants are not under serious pressure yet.

Even with the unexpected success of Tesla, for instance, the company still sold less than 35,000 cars last year in a national market of more than 16 million units. And Tesla’s cars are confined to a very high-end niche market.

“Apple is not an immediate threat to the US auto industry. I don’t think you’ll see the volume there, the number of cars won’t really begin to approach anything like Detroit is making right now at any time soon,” said Visnic.

Alec Gutierrez, a market analyst at Kelley Blue Book, said Apple’s strength is its role as a “disruptor” in industries, and that the “comprehensive ecosystem” of its popular consumer electronics could be extended to an “Apple car”.

Money to spend

Apple has the money to put into a new car — some $180 billion in capital built up to invest in new projects.

Even so, said Gutierrez, given the costs and competition in the auto industry, “it’s fraught with risk”.

“The automotive space is so highly competitive today, and margins in new car sales are extraordinarily thin, which is something Apple is not used to.”

“How many companies have totally failed into trying to enter the automotive industry? It’s a tough thing and it’s very expensive,” added Brett Smith, programme director at the Centre for Automotive Research.

He pointed to Tesla continuing to lose money despite its success in marketing its luxury cars with battery systems superior to any offered by Detroit.

And the major automakers are all working hard on making more and better hybrid and all-electric vehicles.

That sets a high bar for any new entrant, notes Smith.

“Does Apple have better technologies than Mercedes or Ford or GM or Toyota to build a car? I really doubt it.”

What Apple could bring to the industry is what Google brings: ways to process and use data.

Google is focused not on the physical car itself but on the technology that will allow cars to run themselves. Its self-driving vehicles, in the guise of various car models, have already driven hundreds of thousands of kilometres on California roads in test runs.

Apple already has something to offer the industry, notes Visnic. It could become a key supplier of connectivity technology for cars, putting its operating systems up against Google’s Android, already being installed in many car models.

“For Apple, they have proven to be phenomenally good at user experience,” Smith told AFP.

“The car for them will become another user experience device, and that will differentiate them.”

According to a fall 2014 report from the US Department of Labour, more American workers are on the move than ever before.

The report states that 2.8 million people quit their jobs last September — the highest number since April of 2008. In addition, another 1.6 million workers left their jobs due to layoffs and terminations. That means nearly 4.5 million workers were faced with a very important question — what is the best way to leave a job?

Whether you’re terminated, downsized or leave on your own accord, there are many ways to ensure a graceful exit and to employ proper protocol when leaving your present position.

Regardless of the circumstances, these measures will not only keep your reputation intact but they can also help you chart a polished and professional exit strategy.

Be honest about why you are leaving. If you need a change, a more positive work environment, an increase in salary or you simply need a new career challenge, be honest about why you are leaving. If your company gives exit interviews, you can also offer feedback on ways to enhance working conditions.

Keep it positive. Think of the good things you have done for the company and what you have learned from them. Stay positive about your departure and don’t whine or complain about your boss or co-workers because you never know when a former colleague may be in a position to help or hinder your career in the future.

Give good notice. Although a two weeks’ notice is the accepted standard when leaving a job, be sensitive about the timing of your transition. Could you stay longer to assist in training your replacement? Will you leave the company in a bind? You can also help your employer with the transition in such ways as creating a folder with your most up to date documents and a list of upcoming deadlines and projects.

Keeping things private. You’ve no doubt heard about over the top ways that disgruntled or combative employees have left their jobs in very public ways — but these are not stories to emulate. First and foremost, you should refrain from sharing the news of your impending exit on social media.

If you’ve found a new position, only share the news with the appropriate supervisor and refrain from sharing the news with co-workers or friends. Even if you were terminated or left under harsh circumstances, take the high road when discussing your tenure with a former employer. With many employers now checking social media postings as part of background checks, it’s best to stay above board both on and offline.

Don’t steal. It may seem obvious, but many employees think that when leaving a job, it’s harmless to keep a few mementos. However, this sort of behaviour can be interpreted as theft.

Before you leave a position, be sure to return all flash drives, electronic equipment such as laptops, tablets, cell phones, office/desk keys and other company owned items. Also, don’t collect the company’s client list or intellectual property for your own personal use. You may be in violation of a “non-compete” agreement and could face legal action.

Finish the job you started. As you begin the final countdown to your last day on the job, you may be tempted to cut corners, take extra long lunches or leave an unfinished project for your eventual replacement.

However, adopting this type of “short timer” attitude can alienate your co-workers, people who you may hope to remain socially connected to in the future. By remaining an active member of the team, you will ensure your reputation remains intact long after you clock out for the final time.