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Abu Dhabi — A dramatic fall in traffic accidents this week has been directly linked to the three-day disruption in BlackBerry services.

In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents this week fell 40 per cent and there were no fatal accidents.

On average there is a traffic accident every three minutes in Dubai, while in Abu Dhabi there is a fatal accident every two days.

{ The National | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Prince, Untitled (Upstate), 1995-99 }

But this misconception about what is a reasonable commute is probably the biggest thing that is keeping most people in the US and Canada poor.

Let’s take a typical day’s drive for this self-destructive couple. Adding 38 miles of round-trip driving at the IRS’s estimate of total driving cost of $0.51 per mile, there’s $19 per day of direct driving and car ownership costs. It is possible to drive for less, but these people happen to have fairly new cars, bought on credit, so they are wasting the full amount.

Next is the actual human time wasted. At 80 minutes per day, the self-imposed driving would be adding the equivalent of almost an entire work day to each work week – so they would now effectively be working 6 workdays per week.

After 10 years, multiplied across two cars since they have different work schedules, this decision would cost them about $125,000 in wealth (if they had for example chosen to put the $19/day into extra payments on their mortgage), and 1.3 working years worth of time, EACH, spent risking their lives daily behind the wheel.

{ Mr. Money Mustache | Continue reading }

related { New York City and Washington have average commutes of about 34 minutes }

After returning from holiday, it’s likely you felt that the journey home by plane, car or train went much quicker than the outward journey, even though in fact both distances and journey are usually the same. So why the difference?

According to a new study it seems that many people find that, when taking a trip, the way back seems shorter. The findings suggest that this effect is caused by the different expectations we have, rather than being more familiar with the route on a return journey. (…)

“The ‘return trip effect’ also existed when respondents took a different, but equidistant, return route. You do not need to recognize a route to experience the effect.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Mitch Epstein, Kennedy Airport, New York City, 1973 }

Last year, for the first time in history, a billion cars and trucks hit the road. (…)

What’s stunning is how far countries like China and India still have to go. Right now, there’s one car in China for every 17.2 people, compared with one car for every 1.3 people in the United States. If China caught up to the U.S. ownership rate, the country would field a billion vehicles all by itself.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Laura Helms }

There’s one prediction about driverless cars that I can make with confidence: If millions of them ever roam the public highways, they will be far safer than cars driven by people. My confidence in this assertion does not derive from mere faith in technology. It’s just that if robotic drivers were as dangerous as human ones, then computer-controlled cars would never be allowed on the roads. We hold our machines to a higher standard than ourselves.

Over the past decade, the number of auto accidents in the United States—counting only those serious enough to be reported to the police—has been running at about six million a year. Those accidents kill about 40,000 people and injure well over two million more. Estimates of the economic impact are in the neighborhood of $200 billion. Much of that cost is shared among car owners through premiums for auto insurance.

This safety record certainly leaves ample room for improvement. An appropriate goal for automated vehicles might be to reduce highway carnage to the same order of magnitude experienced in other modes of transport, such as railroads and commercial aviation. That would mean bringing road fatalities down to roughly 1 percent of their current level—from 40,000 deaths per year to 400. (In terms of deaths per passenger mile, cars would then be the safest of all vehicles.)

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

At their most fundamental level, brains are made up of neurons. And those neurons collectively comprise the two main types of brain tissue: white matter is made up primarily of  axons, and grey matter is made up of  synapses, or the connections between neurons.

Grey matter exists as a thin, relatively flat sheet covering the rest of the brain, and is referred to as the cortex. When you compare the brains of different mammal species, you find that certain measurements of brain structure scale in similar ways. In other words, variables like grey matter volume, total number of synapses, white matter volume, number of neurons, surface area, axon diameter, and number of distinct cortical “areas” maintain common mathematical relationships with each other, whether you’re looking at the brains of mice, rabbits, dogs, cats, hyenas, kangaroos, bats, sloths, bonobos, or humans. (…)

Lots of networks have been compared to urban systems. (…) To what extent, though, might a brain be like a city? There’s the obvious analogy: neurons are like highways. Neurons are channels that carry information in the form of electric signals from one location within the brain to another, while highways are channels that transport people and materials from one location within a city to another. Cognitive scientists Mark Changizi and Marc Destefano think that the analogy goes deeper. (…) They argue that the organization of city highway networks is driven over time by political and economic forces, rather than explicitly planned based on principles of highway engineering – which means that city highway systems may be subject to a form of selection pressure similar to the selection pressure exerted on biological systems.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Keith Davis }

Designers and engineers labour to create artificial noises that make life easier whether by generating atmosphere or making you feel more secure. (…)

To produce the ideal clunk, car doors are designed to minimise the amount of high frequencies produced (we associate them with fragility and weakness) and emphasise low, bass-heavy frequencies that suggest solidity. The effect is achieved in a range of different ways – car companies have piled up hundreds of patents on the subject – but usually involves some form of dampener fitted in the door cavity. Locking mechanisms are also tailored to produce the right sort of click and the way seals make contact is precisely controlled. (…)

The EU is still in the process of drafting a law which will require electric vehicle makers to have a signature sound with a minimum volume to make sure other road users can hear the otherwise silent machines whizzing towards them. (…)

While some US sports teams use artificial crowd noise to unsettle the opposition, lots of venues use it as a handy way to help amp up the atmosphere and encourage the real spectators to join in. (…)

Lots of modern telephone systems as well as software like Skype employ noise reduction techniques. Unfortunately, that can result in total silence at quiet points in a conversation and leave you wondering if the call has stopped entirely. To fill those lulls, the software adds artificial noise at a barely audible volume.

{ Humans Invent | Continue reading }

UPS managed to save 3 million gallons of gas in 2006 by altering the routes of delivery trucks to avoid left turns. According to them, the company uses software called “package flow” to map out daily routes for drivers.

The problem the UPS driver faces, generally speaking, is that of the “traveling salesman,” in which our hero seeks the shortest possible round trip route given a list of required stops. Arising in road trip planning, school bus pickups, parking meter coin collection, power cable layout, and microchip design, it is not a new problem.

The famous 19th century Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton, who at age 12 once defeated the notorious American “calculating boy” Zerah Colburn in an arithmetic-off, invented the “Icosian game,” in which players attempt to find round-trip routes through a twelve-sided figure such that each vertex is visited exactly once and no edge is visited twice.

Inspired by Hamilton’s early work and puzzle-making prowess, mathematicians in Vienna and Cambridge began studying the general form of the traveling salesman problem (TSP for short) in the 1930s.

In 1972, UC Berkeley Professor Richard Karp published perhaps the most famous paper written to date in computer science, called “Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems.” The point, broadly speaking, is that most problems that appear difficult to solve exactly most likely are. Rather than proving that all kinds of problems have no easy solution, Karp gave a clever method for showing that many different sorts of problems are equivalent in a certain sense: if you provide a magic fast solver for hard problem A, Karp uses it to build a fast solver for hard problem B.

As a result, researchers are amassing an impressive set of hard problems, all reducible to each other, so that if anyone ever found a magic solver for just one of them, well, things would get pretty crazy. A variant of the TSP, that of undirected Hamiltonian Circuits (same Hamilton), was in Karp’s original list of 21 problems. (…)

Computer scientists spend much time devising heuristics — approximate methods for dealing with intractable situations. Here’s a simple heuristic for the traveling salesman: when trying to decide which stop to visit next on the tour, pick the closest remaining one. While in many cases, this rule yields a route much less efficient than the optimal one, it works reasonably well on average.

{ LiveScience, 2008 | Continue reading }

image { Peter Crnokrak }

{ A rocket that could one day act as a capsule for a single human passenger makes its first test flight. }

{ Kevin Cyr }

{ Kill Devil Hills is a town in Dare County, North Carolina, USA. Nearby Kitty Hawk is frequently cited as the location of the Wright brothers‘ first controlled, powered airplane flights on December 17, 1903. The flights actually occurred in Kill Devil Hills. | Wikipedia | Continue reading Photo: First flight of the Wright Flyer I, December 17, 1903, Orville piloting, Wilbur running at wingtip. }

{ Alan Wolfson, Canal St. Cross Section, 2009-2010 }

related:

{ George Segal, Walk, Don’t Walk, 1976 }

Researchers who have spent the last two years studying the security of car computer systems have revealed that they can take control of vehicles wirelessly.

The researchers were able to control everything from the car’s brakes to its door locks to its computerized dashboard displays by accessing the onboard computer through GM’s OnStar and Ford’s Sync, as well as through the Bluetooth connections intended for making hands-free phone calls. They presented their findings this week.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Three new lines will be added to the New York City subway system next fall, giving residents of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District direct transit service down to Soho and up to the Upper East Side.

Plans call for two rapid transit subway lines and one ultra-slow line: The BB, the K, and the RL–which respectively stand for Boone Boone, Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. The three lines are expected to open October 15, 2011 in unison.

M.T.A. awarded the construction contract to Manhattan-based company Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC. Other projects the firm currently works on include the eradication of Science Limited, the maintenance of a jellyfish farm, and private lectures on Spinoza. Imp Kerr will serve as executive supervisor.

{ Text | Images and maps }

from Australia { Shaun Gladwell, Interceptor Surf Sequence, 2009 }

{ How the U.S. Secret Service pulls off the most complicated security event of the year, from counter-surveillance to counter-assault, hotel booking to event schedule. | The Atlantic | full story | Chart: The Presidential Motorcade }

{ www.mta.me turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument }

more to watch { Documentary on American composer Milton Babbitt, who died Saturday, Jan. 29 }

The usual black bottom strip on those signs has been replaced by a colorful set of horizontal lines, evoking the aesthetic of the subway map. The transportation authority’s circular blue logo now sits atop the poster, astride a helpful “.info” to direct passengers to the authority’s Web site. The MTA worked with its longtime agency, Korey Kay Partners, the agency that created the “SubTalk” motto in 1993.


{ NY Times | Continue reading }