Smart cars to mean safer driving

As was discussed in my book with John Urry - After the Car - one side of in-car technologies will be increased 'intelligent sensors' placed into cars. As this recent post from the BBC explains,

Cars could soon be ringing the emergency services themselves if they are involved in a crash.

Sensors embedded in future vehicles could also let emergency services work out the severity of the crash and how many people were involved.

The predictions came at a symposium considering the changes ushered in by the spread of small, smart processors. The growing number of on-board computers could also spell big changes for the way people drive.

"The car is probably going to be the most compute-intensive possession that we will have," said Steve Wainwright, European manager at Freescale Semiconductor which makes many of the chips inside car control systems.

Mr Wainwright said average cars have 25-30 electronic control units onboard already and high-end cars probably carry up to 80. These tiny computers are in charge of many car systems such as stability control, power distribution, safety and many others. 

Increasingly, said Mr Wainwright, they are helping to augment a person's driving skill and that trend would only continue as technologies such as collision detection systems and radar become more commonplace.

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City scares drivers with ’3D girl’ that runs into road

Good idea or a sure fire accident? The debate is on....and what would be your reaction if you 'think' you saw a young child in the road.....albeit a clever 3D drawing??

For the past week, drivers on 22nd Street in the ritzy suburb of West Vancouver, British Columbia, have come across an alarming sight: A small girl running out into the road to chase a ball.

As their hearts leap to their throats and their feet move to the brake pedal, the drivers realize it's an illusion -- a "3D" image drawn on the pavement to get drivers to slow down. The "3D girl" isn't really 3D -- it's a cartoon drawn on the pavement in a distorted fashion so as to appear three-dimensional, the culmination of a pilot project from the British Columbia Automobile Association, an affiliate of the AAA, and the city of West Vancouver.

It's an innovative idea that some critics say could cause accidents. "I think it's awful. I think it's dangerous," Sam Schwartz, a former traffic commissioner in New York City, told ABC News. "I think drivers are always scanning and suddenly they see this image up, they may very well panic."

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Britain's 'seven social tribes' mapped

An interesting novel way of cartography when it comes to mapping Britain's 'social tribes'...aA team of cartographers at London's City University have created a visualisation of Britain which makes 'the traditional map of the British Isles look outdated by comparison'.The Telegraph article reports that:

South of England as visualised by the Seven Social Tribes of Britain by City University London's giCentre.

 

The mosaic-like map beautifully visualises the "Seven Social Tribes of Britain", combining postcode information with demographic data from the Government.

This map emphasises different types of people and their concentration in different areas of the country, unlike traditional maps which highlight geography.

Each set of pixels on the map is a postcode and is coloured according to economic measures based on census data...The seven tribes of Britain visualised on the map are: Blue Collar Communities, City Living, Countryside, Prospering Suburbs, Constrained by Circumstances, Typical Traits and Multicultural.

A close up of the North London postcode section of the map. The bluer areas indicate that mainly people who fit a multicultural category as defined by the Office for National Statistics live in those areas.

These three different ways of visualising the same data on a map demonstrates the effectiveness of the new technique. Most of the UK is sparsely populated, which makes visualising information about people on a geographically proportionate map less useful and less interesting.

Read more at - 'Britain's 'seven social tribes' mapped'

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Virtual worlds: is this where real life is heading?

Things have been quite for a while concering virtual worlds, now that the hype around Second Life has more or less died down....anyway, this recent post from The Guardian has some useful recent overviews, such as concerning apps like Farmville:

Recently a man bought a space station for $330,000, while last month Small Planet Foods, a subsidiary of General Foods, introduced a new brand of organic blueberries. What have these two products got in common? Neither actually exist. Well, not except as pixels in the virtual worlds where they are traded. Only the money is real.

The space station was sold in the virtual world Entropia Universe, which has its own economy and currency. The buyer, who converted his $300,000 into 3.3m PED (Project Entropia dollars), is convinced that virtual shops on his virtual space station will produce virtual profits that can be converted back into real dollars. The blueberries represent a "brand extension" of a product that exists in the real world as US company General Foods aims to establish a presence in FarmVille, a game which exists as an application on Facebook and which at its peak has had nearly 80 million players. It is a classic example of a new genre.

Farmers in FarmVille buy cartoon-like virtual farm animals, which have to be regularly fed, or crops that require fertiliser (virtual, of course) to help them grow, in order to be more successful than their friends. The real-time game has its own virtual currency that makes it easier for members to trade and for the game's makers to profit. Parent company Zynga has revenues of more than $600m a year which come mainly from FarmVille, despite competition from half a dozen other farm games on Facebook. Zynga is reckoned to be worth between $4bn and $5bn, based on the value of investment stakes that have been taken in it.

To many, this seems crazy: why spend real money to buy a virtual currency to purchase food in order to stop a pig that doesn't exist from dying through lack of food? The easy answer is why not – if that's what you want to do. It is arguably a lot more "real" – whatever that means these days – than, say, sitting like a couch potato watching a soap on television.

This might still seem the stuff of fantasy but it's where real life seems to be heading: according to some analysts, we are in the midst of a virtual revolution that might one day be considered as important as the industrial revolution. Nic Mitham, founder of KZero, a Cambridge-based consultancy, says that there are 175 virtual worlds that are live or in live beta and that the number of registered users to them has risen from 880 million in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 1.1 billion today, a 25% increase within six months in the middle of a recession. The registered population of virtual worlds (even if this is not the same as active users) is greater than the populations of the US and Europe combined.

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Tesco launches UK's first 'drive-thru' supermarket

True 'car mobility' now comes to grocery shopping - getting your bags without even having to leave the car. Tesco is trialling a new service that will allow customers to pick up their weekly shop via 'drive-thro': 

The supermarket will launch the trial at a store in Baldock, Hertfordshire, this week before a possible national roll-out.Under the scheme – which aims to appeal to busy mothers and shopaphobes alike – customers will order shopping online and then drive to a designated area in the store's car park to have their products loaded into their car at a pre-arranged time. Tesco said that the service has been designed for shoppers who want their goods picked and packed but who do not have the time to wait at home for delivery. 

Laura Wade-Gery, chief executive of Tesco.com and Tesco Direct, said: "This will be especially popular with busy mums who have the school run and children's activities to manage. It also offers a solution to parents who want to avoid the challenge of shopping in a busy store with children in tow."

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GPS Trackers Secretly Placed in Unilever Laundry Detergent Boxes

We are now seeing the shift of GPS tracking devices from larger commercial objects to marketing objects...which mirrors WalMarts move into RFID chipping its products:

The household cleaning product giant Unilever has secretly placed GPS tracker transmitters in laundry detergent boxes to track consumers to their homes. With an array of electronic sensors, team of Unilever agents can now pinpoint the exact location of the GPS trackers and walk right up to your front door. They can even remotely set off a beeper inside the box using radio electronics.

The point of all this? It's part of Unilever's new marketing campaign to convince consumers in Brazil to purchase more boxes of Omo laundry detergent.

The GPS trackers, you see, are only embedded in "prize winning" boxes of Omo detergent. If you happen to buy one of these GPS tracked boxes, you're a "winner" and Unilever agents then show up at your door with a video camera crew and a prize. This new detergent marketing contest was detailed in an Ad Age article called Is Your Detergent Stalking You? (http://adage.com/globalnews/article...)

That article explains that Unilever "...has teams in 35 Brazilian cities ready to leap into action when a box is activated. The nearest team can reach the shopper's home 'within hours or days,' and if they're really close by, 'they may get to your house as soon as you do.'"

This creepy "Big Brother" marketing idea is apparently exactly the kind of thing the Unilever company approves of: Spying on your customers. Unilever, by the way, is the parent company that brings you brands like Lipton tea, Skippy peanut butter, Axe cologne, and the infamous Slim-Fast sugar drink that's somehow positioned as a "weight loss" product.

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Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

The Danger Room blog has more information on the 'predicted future' software that Google and Pentagon interests are investing in:

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community. 

It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

Read more at - 'Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring'

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Mind-controlled app calls your friends with the power of thought

A new app for the Nokia N900’s Maemo platform has emerged that claims to be able to dial a contact using only the power of thought:

ThinkContacts is designed to allow a “Motor disabled person to make a phone call to a desired contact by himself/herself”. Requiring a special headset to read users’ brainwaves, it uses brain activity to determine which of three contacts on the screen the user wants to call.

While the app is looking quite basic at present, the project’s wiki at Forum Nokia only opened six days ago meaning this is likely to be an early-stage project. The wiki describes how the app works:

“The user controls the selection of the desired contact by controlling his/her level of meditation and attention. If the user’s level of attention is higher than 70% the software switches to the next contact in the list, if it is lower than 30% the software switches to the previous, otherwise the current contact will not be switched. If the user’s meditation level is higher than 80%, the software makes a phone call to the contact located at the center of the screen.”

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Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy

New Scientist has an intriguing post on the power of neuromarketing....which is coming to a magazine cover near you!

TAKE A look at the cover of this week's New Scientist magazine (right). Notice anything unusual? Thought not, but behind the scenes your brain is working overtime, focusing your attention on the words and images and cranking up your emotions and memory. How do we know? Because we tested it with a brain scanner.

In what we suspect is a world first, this week's cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people's heads and discover what they really want. You may find that sinister. What right does anyone have to try to read your mind? Or perhaps you are sceptical and consider the idea laughable. But ...

Read more at - 'Mind-reading marketers have ways of making you buy'

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Solar Roadways

Here's a great idea...and what which makes us ask: 'why didn't we think of this before?!'

The Solar Roadways company has made a section of road from the material that airline black boxes are made of and, in it, housed solar cells to collect energy, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. They then said, "What if we added LEDs to "paint" the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving? What if we added a heating element in the surface like the defrosting wire in the rear window of cars to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates?" In 2009, the company received a contract from the Federal Highway Administration to build the first ever Solar Road Panel prototype.

Read more at - 'Solar Roadways'

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On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only

Websites are now gaining the ability to decide whether or not you'd be a good customer, before you tell them a single thing about yourself. And this technology reaches beyond the personalization we are presently familiar with:

You may not know a company called [x+1] Inc., but it may well know a lot about you.

From a single click on a web site, [x+1] correctly identified Carrie Isaac as a young Colorado Springs parent who lives on about $50,000 a year, shops at Wal-Mart and rents kids' videos. The company deduced that Paul Boulifard, a Nashville architect, is childless, likes to travel and buys used cars. And [x+1] determined that Thomas Burney, a Colorado building contractor, is a skier with a college degree and looks like he has good credit.

The company didn't get every detail correct. But its ability to make snap assessments of individuals is accurate enough that Capital One Financial Corp. uses [x+1]'s calculations to instantly decide which credit cards to show first-time visitors to its website.

Read more at - 'On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only'

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Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web

A recent announcement from Bill Gates has the future of our education on the Net - without the plagiarising that is!

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.

He believes that no matter how you came about your knowledge, you should get credit for it. Whether it’s an MIT degree or if you got everything you know from lectures on the web, there needs to be a way to highlight that.

He made sure to say that educational institutions are still vital for children, K-12. He spoke glowingly about charter schools, where kids can spend up to 80% of their time deeply engaged with learning.

But college needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates. Well, except for the parties, he joked.

But his overall point is that it’s just too expensive and too hard to get these upper-level educations. And soon place-based college educations will be five times less important than they are today.

Read more at - 'Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web'

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Indian HR Ministry brings $35 low cost computing device to reality

It's been reported that India has succeeded in delivering the lowest-cost computing device - which might even drop to as low as $10 per unit!

Finally a low-cost computing-cum-access device has been unveiled by HRD minister Shri. Kapil Sibal. The price is this device is expected to be around $35. However, HR ministry is aiming at bringing down the cost of this device to $20 and ultimately to $10. IIT’s and other Technical Institutions are setting up research teams to cover wide range of issues and capability enhancements to achieve the ultimate goal of bringing down the the cost of this device to $10.

I, personally am quite proud to see this happen, and I will tell you the reason why – While the private entities and corporates had given up on this idea, professors and experts from IISc & IIT’s went ahead and devised this concept. While B.tech & M.Tech students were guided to produce the motherboard and other key components.

Even though this device has been unveiled today, the development & research is currently on-going on at various different levels connected with HR Ministry. The ministry is quite confident of bringing down the cost of this device further.

Ultimately the goal of such devices is to spread education in Rural India, by offering such devices with educational courses / materials embedded inside them.

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A hidden world, growing beyond control

An extensive investigative report over at The Washington Post has done a terrific job of highlighting the faults of an over-extensive surveillance world that has come into being in the last decade. A worthy read indeed!

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

Read the full article at - 'A hidden world, growing beyond control'

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Twitter user sends world's 20 billionth tweet

It doesn't sound like an important communication - GGGGGo_Lets_Go .......yet it has become a landmark text...or rather a 'twitter'.....as the social network site Twitter has just had its 20 billionth message posted:

The landmark and rather opaque tweet was sent at 1544 GMT Saturday by GGGGGGo_Lets_Go, a Tokyo graphic designer for an advertising agency. It said: "So that means the barrage might come back later all at once."

Twitter took four years to reach its 10 billionth tweet, in March this year, and less than five months to double it. GGGGGGo_Lets_Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world for hitting the milestone with a tweet which appeared to have been part of a longer conversation with another user.

He later posted another message, saying: "Looks like I posted the 20 billionth tweet. I'm getting replies from people all over the world. It's scary. What are the chances? Maybe I'm going to die.

"Is it more amazing than winning the lottery? I thought it was a joke."

Read more at - 'Twitter user sends world's 20 billionth tweet'

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London saddles up for new bike hire scheme

Finally! A bike hire scheme designed to encourage thousands more cycle journeys in central London has begun...and it's had a great response:

So far, more than 12,000 people have signed up to the idea, far outstripping the 5,000 bicycles which will be available at special docking stations. Transport for London (TfL) has admitted it had been expecting "teething problems".

But it insisted that although members outnumbered the number of bikes, people would not face a shortage.

Already, more than 12,450 keys have been handed out to Londoners enabling them to unlock bikes left at 315 docking points across the city.

The keys cost £3 and the cost of using the cycles varies from £1 for an hour to £50 for 24 hours. TfL and operator Serco expect to roll out the scheme to casual users after a month.

 

 

About 12,000 people had signed up to the scheme - with some asking for more than one key.

But only 6,000 keys had been activated. Until they are activated, cyclists will not be able to withdraw the bikes from docking stations.

Read more at - 'London saddles up for new bike hire scheme'

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Who (Re)Built the Electric Car?

Here's news of an interesting electric car project: it's called the 'ChargeCar' and the project is led by the Carnegie Mellon University associate professor and colleagues Gregg Podnar and Ben Brown...it's all about the battery folks!:

ChargeCar is based at the Electric Garage -- appropriately enough, a repurposed former Exxon station on Forbes Avenue, near CMU's campus. On a rainy July afternoon, Nourbakhsh backs the car from a service bay. Motoring up rain-slick Forbes in rush-hour traffic, then through campus into Schenley Park, Nourbakhsh demonstrates various ChargeCar features. 

It has "regenerative braking," to capture energy conventional cars lose when you hit the brakes. It's dead quiet, except for the hissing of tires on asphalt and the whirring of a brake pump. And though this prototype's top speed is just 45 mph, the fixed-gear ChargeCar accelerates well, easily beating other vehicles off the line as a traffic light turns green...

...ChargeCars wouldn't meet all our transportation needs, of course, or solve all our car-related problems. Like all electric cars, they'd take longer to "refuel" than a gas tank -- a couple hours plugged in to get any range at all, and overnight for a full charge. But even if people kept second cars (which most households have anyway) for long trips, or used rentals, we'd have air a bit cleaner, streets a bit quieter. And we'd have less need of the stuff that's been spewing from a hole in the Gulf of Mexico.

Read more at - 'Who (Re)Built the Electric Car?'

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Emails and phones snooped on by authorities every minute

Yet more proof of our UK surveillance nation...now we see that political and corporate bodies are racing after our private information:

Councils, police and other public bodies are demanding access to people's private telephone and email records at a rate of once a minute after a rise in snooping applications.

Public authorities asked for confidential communications data on more than 525,000 occasions last year including a 13 per cent increase in requests by town halls.There were also errors in hundreds of applications leading to wrong phone numbers, emails or innocent people being monitored, according to the surveillance watchdog. 

Sir Paul Kennedy, the interception of communications commissioner, also warned children and other members of the public could be at risk because of "very serious weaknesses and failing" in the way communications in prisons are monitored.He said flaws or attempts to monitor too much could place the public, as well as other prisoners and staff, in harm's way. 

The figures will fuel concerns over the use of interception powers by some public bodies under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which are mainly aimed at tackling terrorism and serious crime.The Act gives authorities – including councils, the police and intelligence agencies – the power to request access to confidential communications data, including lists of telephone numbers dialled and email addresses to which messages have been sent but not their content.

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Drivers to get £5,000 electric car subsidy

This post from The Telegraph explains how now UK drivers will get up to £5,000 from the Government if they buy an electric car - but the number of grants has been sharply cut from earlier plans:

The subsidy was announced by the Labour government in 2009 but placed on hold by the Coalition until the autumn spending review. From January, any motorist buying a new generation electric car, or ultra-low carbon hybrid, will get 25 per cent off, up to a maximum £5,000. 

However, the number of grants has been slashed from a minimum of 46,000 to as few as 8,600. The scheme has been partially ring-fenced from cuts following pressure from car makers and Britain’s green energy industry.The grants will be available just in time for the UK launch of the Nissan Leaf, the first major rival to the globally successful Toyota Prius.

A full grant would cut the cost of a new Leaf from £28,350 to £23,350, according to a report in The Sun.
Once charged, the cars run for about 70 miles, costing just 3p a mile.Nissan’s Sunderland factory assembles the Leaf, meaning Britain is the company’s third-biggest global electric car base. Nissan itself received grants from the Government to build the Leaf in Sunderland, where the workforce of 4,100 built 338,000 Qashqai, Note and Micra models in 2008.

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Mobile phones 'dirtier than toilet handles'

New research suggests that mobile phones are covered with up to 18 times more living bacteria than the flush handle on a men's lavatory...now, that's sexist! Anyway, here's what is said:

Swabs and analysis of 30 mobile handsets found that seven had high or warning levels of environmental bacteria, according to consumer group Which? One contained such an intense concentration of bacteria, including faecal coliforms, that anyone using it could have faced a serious stomach upset.

Which? said the findings suggest millions of UK mobiles would exceed the recommended acceptable levels of bacteria. While not immediately harmful, elevated levels of bacteria indicate poor hygiene and can act as a breeding ground for more serious germs.Hygiene expert Jim Francis told Which?: "The levels of potentially harmful bacteria on one mobile were off the scale. That phone needs sterilising."

The tests showed how easily bacteria could linger on the surface of a phone, which could be passed on to other people if they held the handset to look at photos or other applications.

Which? advises that phones can be cleaned with an alcohol wipe.

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