‘Data Shows Google’s Robot Cars Are Smoother, Safer Drivers Than You or I’
October 26th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review:
Data gathered from Google’s self-driving Prius and Lexus cars shows that they are safer and smoother when steering themselves than when a human takes the wheel, according to the leader of Google’s autonomous-car project.
Chris Urmson made those claims today at a robotics conference in Santa Clara, California. He presented results from two studies of data from the hundreds of thousands of miles Google’s vehicles have logged on public roads in California and Nevada.
One of those analyses showed that when a human was behind the wheel, Google’s cars accelerated and braked significantly more sharply than they did when piloting themselves. Another showed that the cars’ software was much better at maintaining a safe distance from the vehicle ahead than the human drivers were.
“We’re spending less time in near-collision states,” said Urmson. “Our car is driving more smoothly and more safely than our trained professional drivers.”
Related: IBM’s Watson Is Better at Diagnosing Cancer than Human Doctors
All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines
October 26th, 2013Via: The Atlantic:
We rely on computers to fly our planes, find our cancers, design our buildings, audit our businesses. That’s all well and good. But what happens when the computer fails?
7.3 Magnitude Earthquake Off Coast of Japan
October 26th, 2013Via: Independent:
The operators of Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant said there was no further damage caused to the wrecked plant early on Saturday, despite a magnitude 7.1 to 7.3 earthquake striking offshore and triggering a small tsunami.
An earthquake official with the Japan Meteorological Agency said the quake was an aftershock of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck the same area in 2011, killing about 19,000 people and devastating the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant.
Workers at the plant were told to leave waterfront areas and head to higher ground.
Japanese television reported a one foot tsunami had reached Japan’s east coast, but one-metre high tsunami advisory warnings were lifted approximately two hours later.
A spokesperson for the Fukushima plant reported no damage or abnormalities in radiation readings had been found, and the national Fire and Disaster Management Agency said only one minor injury was reported.
The epicenter of the 2.10am quake hit about 170 miles off Fukushima, and was felt as far as 300 miles away in Tokyo.
The PC is Not Dead, We Just Don’t Need New Ones
October 26th, 2013Unless you plan on playing Star Citizen. *chortle*
Via: Idiallo:
When was the last time you needed to buy a new PC? Two years ago? Three years ago? The last PC I built was in 2009. I had to upgrade because I pushed the previous one I built to the limit and that was in 2004. A 2009 desktop is old in computer years, but not so much in processing power. It maybe true that there are a zillion new processors out in the market and their benchmark show exponential improvement. But to me benchmarking is just a marketing gimmick. PC sales are plunging but they are the wrong indicator to determine the advancement of the technology. The reason we are not buying PCs anymore is because those we have are already pretty amazing.
Filesharing Site Revealed to be Anti-Piracy ‘Honeypot’
October 26th, 2013Via: Guardian:
A high-profile file-sharing site has been revealed to be a year-long pirate “honeypot”, collecting data on users, file hosters and websites.
The revelation, which had users of the forum up in arms, accompanied the purchase of the UploaderTalk (UT) site by US-based anti-piracy company Nuke Piracy.
A honeypot is a facility, in this case a site, run under false pretences that encourages criminal behaviour in an effort to collect incriminating data.
“That’s right – the biggest swerve ever,” the operator of UT, known only as WDF, said in a statement about the purchase of the site. “I, WDF, work for the anti-piracy people!”
A 140-Acre Forest Is About to Materialize in the Middle of Detroit
October 26th, 2013The Hantz Forest Burbclave.
Via: The Atlantic Cities:
After nearly five years of planning, a large-scale attempt to turn a big chunk of Detroit into an urban forest is now underway. The purchase of more than 1,500 vacant city-owned lots on the city’s lower east side – a total of more than 140 acres – got final approval from Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder last week.
The buyer is Hantz Farms, and it’s a venture of financier John Hantz, who lives in the nearby Indian Village neighborhood. Indian Village is an affluent enclave of manor-scale historic homes, but much of the surrounding area is blighted. Hantz Farms will pay more than $500,000 for the land, which consists of non-contiguous parcels in an area where occupied homes are increasingly surrounding by abandoned properties.
The company has committed to clearing 50 derelict structures, cleaning up the garbage dumped across the neighborhood, planting 15,000 trees, and mowing regularly. Planting of the hardwoods will begin in earnest next fall, and the urban forest will be called Hantz Woodlands.
The huge deal drew criticism last year, when the city council – which was then still in control of Detroit – voted 5-4 to approve the sale. A coalition of grassroots urban farmers and community activists opposed it, charging that it was a play to increase land values by buying a huge swath of acreage and taking it off the market. “I think it opens the gateway for other rich folks to come here to buy up land and essentially make themselves rich compounds,” urban gardener Kate Devlin told The Huffington Post at the time.
John Hantz agrees. But he thinks that’s a good thing. As he told The Atlantic back in 2010:
[T]here’s no reason to buy real estate in Detroit—every year, it just gets cheaper. We’ve gone from 2 million people to 800,000. There are over 200,000 abandoned parcels of land and—by debatable estimates—30,000 acres of abandoned property. We need to create scarcity, because until we get a stabilized market, there’s no reason for entrepreneurs or other people to start buying. I thought, What could do that in a positive way? What’s a development that people would want to be associated with? And that’s when I came up with a farm.
Is Google Building a Large Floating Data Center in San Francisco Bay?
October 26th, 2013It’s made out of shipping containers and will possibly harness the motion of waves to generate electricity.
Great reporting, Cnet!
Via: Cnet:
Something big and mysterious is rising from a floating barge at the end of Treasure Island, a former Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And Google’s fingerprints are all over it.
It’s unclear what’s inside the structure, which stands about four stories high and was made with a series of modern cargo containers. The same goes for when it will be unveiled, but the big tease has already begun. Locals refer to it as the secret project.
Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But after going through lease agreements, tracking a contact tied to the project on LinkedIn, talking to locals on Treasure Island, and consulting with experts, it’s all but certain that Google is the entity that is building the massive structure that’s in plain sight, but behind tight security.
In Almost Every European Country, Bikes Are Outselling New Cars
October 25th, 2013Via: NPR:
We know that Europeans love their bicycles — think or . Denmark specifically for cyclists.
Indeed, earlier this month, , which has long had a love affair with cars, is embracing the bicycle: For the first time on record, Lauren noted, bicycles outsold cars in the country.
But it’s becoming a Continent-wide phenomenon. More bikes were sold in than cars — for the first time since World War II.
This prompted us to look at the figures across the 27 member states of the European Union for both and . New-car registrations for Cyprus and Malta weren’t available, so we took them out of the comparison.
Here’s what we found: Bicycle sales outpaced new-car sales last year in every one of those countries, except Belgium and Luxembourg.
Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters
October 25th, 2013Via: Rolling Stone:
While the specifics of which police departments utilize what surveillance technologies is often unclear, there is evidence to suggest that use of mass surveillance against individuals not under direct investigation is common. “The default is mass surveillance, the same as NSA’s ‘collect it all’ mindset,” says King. “There’s not a single company that if you installed their product, [it] would comply with what anyone without a security clearance would think is appropriate, lawful use.”
Most Americans Accumulating Debt Faster Than They’re Saving for Retirement
October 25th, 2013Via: Washington Post:
A majority of Americans with 401(k)-type savings accounts are accumulating debt faster than they are setting aside money for retirement, further undermining the nation’s troubled system for old-age saving, a new report has found.
Three in five workers with defined contribution accounts are “debt savers,” according to the report released Thursday, meaning their increasing mortgages, credit card balances and installment loans are outpacing the amount of money they are able to save for retirement.
The imbalance is expanding even as policymakers are encouraging people to set aside more by offering generous tax breaks and automatically enrolling workers in retirement accounts that in some cases automatically escalate the amount of money over time.
Currently, workers with retirement savings accounts put aside more than 11 percent of their pay for retirement — 5 percent in their own accounts, and 6.2 percent in Social Security.
Despite that — and despite the $2.5 trillion the report says employers have poured into defined contribution accounts from 1992 to 2012 — the retirement readiness of most Americans has been slipping, according to the report by HelloWallet, a D.C. firm that offers technology-based financial advice to workers and conducts research of economic behavior.
