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"transportation" entries
Toyota Code, Sapir-Wharf-Emoji, Crowdsourcing Formal Proof, and Safety-Critical Code
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Toyota’s Spaghetti Code — Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables. And he was critical of Toyota watchdog supervisor — software to detect the death of a task — design. He testified that Toyota’s watchdog supervisor ‘is incapable of ever detecting the death of a major task. That’s its whole job. It doesn’t do it. It’s not designed to do it.’ (via @qrush)
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Google’s Design Icons (Kevin Marks) — Google’s design icons distinguish eight kinds of airline seats but has none for trains or buses.
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Verigames — DARPA-funded game to crowdsource elements of formal proofs. (via Network World)
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10 Rules for Writing Safety-Critical Code — which I can loosely summarize as “simple = safer, use the built-in checks, don’t play with fire.”
Makey Makey Go, Driverless Accidents, HTTP/2 Guidelines, and Choking The Mac
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Makey Makey Go (Kickstarter) — $19 portable Makey Makey hardware kit. (via Makezine)
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US Driverless Car Accidents (NYTimes) — Delphi sent AP an accident report showing its car was hit, but Google has not made public any records, so both enthusiasts and critics of the emerging technology have only the company’s word on what happened. The California Department of Motor Vehicles said it could not release details from accident reports. This lack of transparency troubles critics who want the public to be able to monitor the rollout of a technology that its own developers acknowledge remains imperfect.
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Architecting Websites for the HTTP/2 Era — HTTP/2 introduces multiplexing, which allows one TCP/IP connection to request and receive multiple resources, intertwined. Requests won’t be blocking anymore, so there is no need for multiple TCP connections on multiple domain names. In fact, opening multiple connections would hurt performance in HTTP/2. This is going to be exciting.
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tripmode — software to control the downloads your Mac software wants to make, even when you’re tethered or on a pay-per-meg hotspot.
Disruption, Copyright Investment, Max Headroom, and Right to Tinker
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The Difference Between Direct Competition and Disruption — As the ships grow, their engines have become vastly more efficient and sophisticated, the fuel mix has changed, and complex IT infrastructure has been put in place to coordinate the movement of the containers and ships. But fundamentally, the underlying cost structure of the business has not changed from 1950, when the first container ships carried a mere 500 to 800 containers across the world. (via Salim Virani)
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The Impact of Copyright Policy Changes on Venture Capital Investment in Cloud Computing Companies (PDF) — Our findings suggest that decisions around the scope of copyrights can have significant impacts on investment and innovation. We find that VC investment in cloud computing firms increased significantly in the U.S. relative to the EU after the Cablevision decision. Our results suggest that the Cablevision decision led to additional incremental investment in U.S. cloud computing firms that ranged from $728 million to approximately $1.3 billion over the two-and-a-half years after the decision. When paired with the findings of the enhanced effects of VC investment relative to corporate investment, this may be the equivalent of $2 to $5 billion in traditional R&D investment.
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Max Headroom Oral History — “Anybody under the age of 25 just loved it. And anybody above that age was just completely confused.”
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Auto Makers Say You Don’t Own Your Car (EFF) — Most of the automakers operating in the U.S. filed opposition comments through trade associations, along with a couple of other vehicle manufacturers. They warn that owners with the freedom to inspect and modify code will be capable of violating a wide range of laws and harming themselves and others. They say you shouldn’t be allowed to repair your own car because you might not do it right. They say you shouldn’t be allowed to modify the code in your car because you might defraud a used car purchaser by changing the mileage. They say no one should be allowed to even look at the code without the manufacturer’s permission because letting the public learn how cars work could help malicious hackers, “third-party software developers” (the horror!), and competitors.
Bricking Cars, Mapping Epigenome, Machine Learning from Encrypted Data, and Phone Privacy
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Remotely Bricking Cars (BoingBoing) — story from 2010 where an intruder illegally accessed Texas Auto Center’s Web-based remote vehicle immobilization system and one by one began turning off their customers’ cars throughout the city.
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Beginning to Map the Human Epigenome (MIT) — Kellis and his colleagues report 111 reference human epigenomes and study their regulatory circuitry, in a bid to understand their role in human traits and diseases. (The paper itself.)
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Machine Learning Classification over Encrypted Data (PDF) — It is worth mentioning that our work on privacy-preserving classification is complementary to work on differential privacy in the machine learning community. Our work aims to hide each user’s input data to the classification phase, whereas differential privacy seeks to construct classifiers/models from sensitive user training data that leak a bounded amount of information about each individual in the training data set. See also The Morning Paper’s unpacking of it.
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Privacy of Phone Audio (Reddit) — unconfirmed report from Redditor I started a new job today with Walk N’Talk Technologies. I get to listen to sound bites and rate how the text matches up with what is said in an audio clip and give feed back on what should be improved. At first, I though these sound bites were completely random. Then I began to notice a pattern. Soon, I realized that I was hearing peoples commands given to their mobile devices. Guys, I’m telling you, if you’ve said it to your phone, it’s been recorded…and there’s a damn good chance a 3rd party is going to hear it.
3D Shares, Autonomous Golf Carts, Competitive Solar, and Interesting Data Problems
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Cooper-Hewitt Shows How to Share 3D Scan Data Right (Makezine) — important as we move to a web of physical models, maps, and designs.
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Singapore Tests Autonomous Golfcarts (Robohub) — a reminder that the future may not necessarily look like someone used the clone tool to paint Silicon Valley over the world.
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Solar Hits Parity in 10 States, 47 by 2016 (Bloomberg) — The reason solar-power generation will increasingly dominate: it’s a technology, not a fuel. As such, efficiency increases and prices fall as time goes on. The price of Earth’s limited fossil fuels tends to go the other direction.
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Facebook’s Top Open Data Problems (Facebook Research) — even if you’re not interested in Facebook’s Very First World Problems, this is full of factoids like Facebook’s social graph store TAO, for example, provides access to tens of petabytes of data, but answers most queries by checking a single page in a single machine. (via Greg Linden)
2FA, Copy Image Text, Electric Garbage Trucks, and MSFT's Q
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Time to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on Everything (Gizmodo) — instructions for enabling 2fa on Google, Facebook, and other common consumer Internet services. (via BoingBoing)
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Project Naptha — automatically applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. The result is a seamless and intuitive experience, where you can highlight as well as copy and paste and even edit and translate the text formerly trapped within an image. Chrome extension. (via Anil Dash)
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Garbage Trucks and FedEx Vans (IEEE) — Foo alum, Ian Wright, found traction for his electric car biz by selling powertrains for garbage trucks and Fedex vans. Trucks have 20-30y lifetime, but powertrains are replaced several times; the trucks for fleets are custom; and “The average garbage truck in the U.S. spends $55,000 a year on fuel, and up to $30,000 a year on maintenance, mostly brake replacements.”
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Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics (MIT TR) — the race for the “topological qubit”, involving newly-discovered fundamental particles and large technology companies racing to be the first to make something that works.
Public Private Pain, Signature Parsing, OSCON Highlights, and Robocar Culture
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What is Public? (Anil Dash) — the most cogent and articulate (and least hyperventilated dramaware) rundown of just what the problem is, that you’re ever likely to find.
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talon — mailgun’s open sourced library for parsing email signatures.
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Signals from OSCON — some highlights. Watching Andrew Sorensen livecode synth playing (YouTube clip) is pretty wild.
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Two Cultures of Robocars (Brad Templeton) — The conservative view sees this technology as a set of wheels that has a computer. The aggressive school sees this as a computer that has a set of wheels.
Open Autopilot, Record Robot Sales, NSA Myths Busted, and Informative Errors
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beaglepilot (Github) — open source open hardware autopilot for Beagleboard. (via DIY Drones)
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IFR Robot Sales Charts (PDF) — 2013: all-time high of 179,000 industrial robots sold and growth continues in 2014. (via Robohub)
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The Top 5 Claims That Defenders of the NSA Have to Stop Making to Remain Credible (EFF) — great Mythbusting.
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Netflix’s New Error Message — instead of “buffering”, they point the finger at the carrier between them and the customer who is to blame for slow performance. Genius!
Targeted Breakage, Driverless Cars, BitCoin Bigness, and IoT Approaching
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Maciej Ceglowski on Our Internet — If you haven’t already read this because someone pushed it into your hands, read it now. If these vast databases are valuable enough, it doesn’t matter who they belong to. The government will always find a way to query them. Who pays for the servers is just an implementation detail.
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Design Changes Possible With Robot Cars (Brad Templeton) — While a nice windshield may be good for visibility for forward-facing passengers, there is no need to have a large unobstructed view for safety. The windshield can be reinforced with bars, for example, allowing it to be much stronger in the case of impacts, notably impacts with animals. Other than for passenger comfort, the windshield barely has to be there at all. On behalf of everyone who has ever driven in Australia at dusk … I for one welcome our new robot chauffeurs. (via The Atlantic)
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Bitcoin Set to Overtake Paypal Transaction Volumes — “In the next one or two years, Bitcoin can surpass the dollar transaction volumes of other established payment companies including Discover, and even American Express, MasterCard, and Visa,” said SmartMetric CEO Chaya Hendrick. (via Hamish McEwan)
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1 in 5 Americans Has Their Physical Environment on the Internet (Quartz) — One in five adult American internet users already has a device at home that connects the physical environment to the internet, according to a Forrester Research report (paywall) out last week.
Cloud Jurisdiction, Driverless Cars, Robotics IPOs, and Fitting a Catalytic Convertor to Your Data Exhaust
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US Providers Must Divulge from Offshore Servers (Gigaom) — A U.S. magistrate judge ruled that U.S. cloud vendors must fork over customer data even if that data resides in data centers outside the country. (via Alistair Croll)
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Inside Google’s Self-Driving Car (Atlantic Cities) — Urmson says the value of maps is one of the key insights that emerged from the DARPA challenges. They give the car a baseline expectation of its environment; they’re the difference between the car opening its eyes in a completely new place and having some prior idea what’s going on around it. This is a long and interesting piece on the experience and the creator’s concerns around the self-driving cars. Still looking for the comprehensive piece on the subject.
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Recent Robotics-Relate IPOs — not all the exits are to Google.
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How One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy From Big Data (Mashable) — “I really couldn’t have done it without Tor, because Tor was really the only way to manage totally untraceable browsing. I know it’s gotten a bad reputation for Bitcoin trading and buying drugs online, but I used it for BabyCenter.com.”