Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years.

Google: Self-driving cars in 3-5 years.

 The self-driving car could be available to consumers in 3-5 years, the head of Google’s autonomous driving project says. That’s the most optimistic timeframe yet. Other projections have been for 2020 and beyond, which still beats “probably not in our lifetime.” The timeline came from Anthony Levandowski, Google’s product manager for autonomous driving, speaking at a Society for Automotive Engineers conference in Washington last week. “I can’t tell you you’ll be able to have a Google car in your garage next year,” Levandowski said. But he added, “We expect to release the technology in the next five years. In what form it gets released is still to be determined.” Releasing technology is different than announcing a self-driving car going on sale in 3-5 years. The real challenge could be getting the self-driving car approved for use of public highways everywhere, not just the handful of states that allow self-driving cars for test purposes.

 It’s a free country and if you want to mount a soap box and speak out in a public park, you can do it today. If you want to sell a motor vehicle, you have to meet an array of fuel-economy, stability, and crash safety tests, and those take time. Years sometimes. Self-driving cars would have to prove they can drive themselves, deal with jaywalking pedestrians, stop or at least slow when a crossing vehicle runs a red light, and deal with software glitches. Performance metrics for self-driving cars don’t exist yet and the Department of Transportation, which doesn’t offer bonuses for working at internet speed, may be more deliberate and methodical than Google.
“How will the government come up with a performance standard?”

Google 300,000 miles, Lexus self-driving carDan Smith, senior associate director for vehicle safety at the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration ,also spoke at the Jan. 31 SAE panel, Safer & Cleaner Transportation in a Digital Age. According to a report by Bloomberg News, Smith noted, “It gets to be a massive challenge to figure out how will the government come up with a performance standard that is objective and testable for so many different scenarios where failure could possibly occur. Part of that has to do with if we should be looking at the underlying electronics.”

When it comes to regulating auto safety, NHTSA is more tortoise than hare, partly because government moves methodically, partly because it may not be up-to-speed on technology. Last year, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report that took issue with NHTSA’s tech savvy, saying it needed to be more knowledgeable about current car electronics and take the lead in setting car electronics standards proactively. For what it’s worth, the guy Google sent to the forum  founded a company before joining Google and has two degrees in industrial engineering and operations research. NHTSA’s man on the scene has a law degree and two political science degrees; his employer does not offer stock incentives. The National Academies report was looking back at how NHTSA lacked expertise to deal effectively with unintended acceleration issues. It said NHTSA needs an outside board of experts it can call on to assist NHTSA’s engineers.

How to insure the self-driving car may also be an issue. Google’s Levandowski and others have said self-driving cars should be safer and cut accidents, reducing insurance rates. Insurers commonly offer discounts for high-tech safety gear such as stability control. But sometimes they balk. Anti-lock braking systems (ABS), which reduces skidding, might actually cause more accidents if it leads drivers to think they can drive at speed on snowy roads and ABS will stop them in time. So it’s not clear if the insurance on self-driving cars would be lower or higher.
Is the 3-5 year timeframe realistic?

When Levandowski described scenarios where Google would be ready to release the autonomous-driving technology in three years or five years (reports say it was described both ways), that’s not the same as dealer-ready cars. Google creates software technology. Ford, Toyota and Audi build cars. To create a car from the ground up, a new model (not an all-new-for-2013 refresh) takes 3-7 years. (The Chevrolet Corvette that was the hit of the recent Detroit auto show will be nine years between models.) The Department of Transportation will have to come up with tests to make sure self-driving cars don’t crash; the toughest part will be testing that shows the software doesn’t crash. Suppliers will have to bring down the cost of autonomous driving sensors. Currently the sensors and hardware (pictured below) cost more than the car they’re mounted on. All that suggests 2020 would be a more reasonable time to think about a completely self-driving vehicle.

In the meantime, look for assisted-driving cars that self-drive (loosely defined) under certain limited conditions. On limited access highways, they’ll maintain a safe following distance and keep pace with traffic ahead and they’ll center themselves in the driving lane, as long as the lane markings are clearly defined. If a driver were to nod off, the car would probably be able to drive safely for miles and miles. Most likely the car would need a drowsy driver alert (a camera watching for flickering eyelids or a movement sensor tracking minor corrections to the steering wheel), since the act of not driving while behind the wheel may be a little too restful.

Global Data On The Rise, But 4G Adoption Slow

Global Data On The Rise, But 4G Adoption Slow

Mobile continues to grow as a web-browsing platform. A new report, the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, part of the comprehensive Cisco VNI Forecast from Cisco Networks, offers some insight into trends happening in mobile.

In 2012, Cisco tracked several activities on mobile networks to tabulate data and identify trends. Top among the trends was the fact global mobile data traffic grew 70 percent last year. Global mobile data traffic reached 885 petabytes per month. In 2011, data traffic reached 520 petabytes a month. Growth in mobile traffic comes with increased proliferation of smartphones and tablets on 3G and 4G networks.

Mobile data traffic is surpassing the global Internet use of the early days in a big way. Cisco compared mobile data traffic to Internet traffic in 2000, the early days of the Internet compared to a similar timeframe in mobile, and found mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of global Internet usage in 2000. Global mobile data traffic for 2012 reached 885 petabytes per month, compared to 75 petabytes per month. It is likely there are more users on the mobile web than there were users on the Internet in 2000. Those users are also used to the Internet, compared to 2000 when the Internet was still relatively new and those who had access weren’t as entrenched in the Internet. In 2000, there was also less content and fewer online services.

The surprising finding in the VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast might be 4G has been around for roughly two years in many regions, yet adoption remains slow. Connections using 4G represent 0.9 percent of mobile connections today, however they account for 14 percent of mobile data traffic. Users of 4G phones and devices generated 19 times more traffic on average, compared to non-4G connections.

Even with sluggish 4G adoption, mobile connection speeds are getting faster. In fact, mobile connection speeds doubled in 2012. “Globally, the average mobile network downstream speed in 2012 was 526 kilobits per second (kbps), up from 248 kbps in 2011. The average mobile network connection speed for smartphones in 2012 was 2,064 kbps, up from 1,211 kbps in 2011,” the report stated.

Cisco identified heavy users in the VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic report. The top 1 percent of mobile data subscribers generate 16 percent of mobile data traffic. In the beginning of 2012, 1 percent of mobile data subscribers generated 52 percent of mobile data traffic. “Mobile data traffic has evened out over the last year and is now lower than 1:20 ratio that has been true of fixed networks for several years,” said the report.

Smartphone usage grew 81 percent in 2012, on average. In 2012, the average amount of traffic per smartphone was 342 MB per month, which is up from 189 MB per month a year before.

While one might think everyone has a smartphone these days — or should have a smartphone — proliferation is actually low. Globally, smartphones represented 18 percent of total handsets in use in 2011. However, smartphones represented 92 percent of total global handset traffic. Smartphones generated 50 times more mobile data traffic — roughly 342 MB per month — than the typical basic-feature cell phone. Feature phones generated 6.8 MB per month of mobile data traffic this past year.

Among smartphones, Android is dominant. By the end of 2012, average Android consumption exceeded average iPhone consumption in the United States and Western Europe. That means Android phones outnumbered iPhones, or users consumed more global data traffic in 2012.

Filterless camera sensor tech from Panasonic might be a low-light breakthrough

Filterless camera sensor tech from Panasonic might be a low-light breakthrough

The Achilles heel of modern camera sensors based on the Bayer color filter array (CFA) is their loss of light. Because each photosite is filtered to only receive either red, green, or blue, over half of the light hitting the sensor is thrown away. For low-light situations, that represents the loss of at least a stop of light — meaning cutting the camera’s shutter speed in half.

 Panasonic claims it has come up with a radical new way to redirect the light coming into a sensor so that nearly all of it can be used by the sensor. Instead of using an array of tiny microfilters in a traditional CFA, the new approach uses what Panasonic calls “micro color splitters” that diffract the light so that various combinations of wavelengths hit different photosites. In their paper in Nature Photonics, Panasonics researchers claim their solution allows the sensor to gather 1.85 times more light than traditional Bayer-array-based sensors.

Panasonic diffraction sensor versus Bayer color filter array
Pioneers get the arrows

Panasonic is not the first company to attempt to throw off the yoke of the Bayer array. Foveon became famous for its unique technology that used all the light hitting its sensor by layering the three color receptors on top of one another. Each layer essentially stripped off the color of light to which it was receptive, passing along the rest. Unfortunately for Foveon, they were alone in using this technique, so all the hard work of developing the sophisticated algorithms (and hardware) for processing the resulting uniquely coded raw images was up to them. As a result, it was years before Foveon had effective noise reduction and powerful enough chips to produce JPEGs in the camera.

Similarly, photosites in the Panasonic sensors will not simply register red, green, or blue. They’ll be receiving combinations of colors: white+red, white-red, white+blue, and white-blue, that come out of the two deflectors in use. Camera firmware will need to demosaic the results — calculating color values from those composites. Unlike with Bayer-array demosaicing — an active field of research with decades of science behind it — Panasonic will need to pave the way for decoding images from its unique sensors. While it is possible to generate RGB values with a simple matrix multiplication of the four color combinations received by diffraction-based sensors, doing it without noise is much more complex.

Panasonic claims that it has been able to use the very powerful FDTD method to compute the final image by simplifying it to be fast enough to compute in real time. This provides a more accurate image than easier to calculate algorithms like B-BPM (Babinet beam propogation method). Like Foveon, Panasonic has protected its invention with a thicket of patents. It has received or filed for 21 Japanese and 16 overseas patents on the technology so far.
Panasonic sample image from diffraction sensor versus Bayer CFA image, showing brighter result from diffraction-based sensor
Not the only attack on the Bayer CFA

In a less-radical attack on the Bayer array, Fujifilm’s high-end X-Pro 1 relies on a clever 6×6 arrangement of differently colored photosites to reduce the image artifacts found in Bayer array cameras. Unlike Panasonic, though, Fujifilm’s approach doesn’t help address the loss of light issue. It still uses microfilters over each photosite which only allow one color to be recorded at each site.

Panasonic is reticent on some of the key attributes of its new technology. It doesn’t say what resolution can be achieved in its press release — although its researchers have claimed that there is no loss of resolution compared to traditional solutions — or how much noise is introduced by the diffraction process. Those details will determine whether Panasonic’s approach will be successful in replacing Bayer arrays in cameras and smartphones or be relegated to specialized market niches like surveillance that require the latest in low-light performance.

earth

earth

in late 2012, scientists based in Germany and Norway published new results about a geophysical theory known as true polar wander. That is a drifting of Earth’s solid exterior – an actual change in latitude for some land masses – relative to our planet’s rotation axis. These scientists used hotspots in Earth’s mantle as part of a computer model, which they say is accurate for the past 120 million years, to identify four possible instances of true polar wander in the past. And, they say, true polar wander is happening now. These scientists published their results in the Journal for Geophysical Research.

 The scientists – including Pavel V. Doubrovine and Trond H. Torsvik of the University of Oslo, and Bernhard Steinberger of the Helmholtz Center in Potsdam, Germany – established what they believe is a stable reference frame for tracking true polar wander. Based on this reference frame, they say that twice – from 90 to 40 million years ago – the solid Earth traveled back and forth by nearly 9 degrees with respect to our planet’s axis of rotation. What’s more, for the past 40 million years, the Earth’s solid outer layers have been slowly rotating at a rate of 0.2 degrees every million years, according to these scientists.

Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. This diagram is greatly exaggerated. According to Doubrovine and his team, Earth’s solid outer layers have been slowly rotating at a rate of 0.2 degrees every million years. Diagram via Wikimedia Commons.

True polar wander is not:

    A geomagnetic reversal, or reversal of Earth’s magnetic field, known to have happened before in Earth history.
    Plate tectonics, which describes the large-scale motions of great land plates on Earth and is thought to be driven by the circulation of Earth’s mantle.
    Precession of the Earth, whereby our world’s axis of rotation slowly moves, tracing out a circle among the stars, causing the identity of our North Star changes over time.

True polar wander is a geophysical theory, a way of thinking about Earth processes that might happen and that these scientists believe do happen. The theory suggests that if an object of sufficient weight on Earth – for example, a supersized volcano or other weighty land mass – formed far from Earth’s equator, the force of Earth’s rotation would gradually pull the object away from the axis around which Earth spins. A supersized volcano far from Earth’s equator would create an imbalance, in other words. As explained at Princeton.edu:

    If the volcanoes, land and other masses that exist within the spinning Earth ever became sufficiently imbalanced, the planet would tilt and rotate itself until this extra weight was relocated to a point along the equator.

That’s the theory of true polar wander. It would cause a movement of Earth’s land masses, but for a different reason than the reason the continents drift in the theory of plate tectonics (formerly called “continental drift”). In the theory of plate tectonics, the continents drift because the layer of Earth underlying our planet’s crust, called the mantle, is convective. That is, it circulates, slowly – like water about to boil. In true polar wander, on the other hand, a similar-seeming movement of land masses on Earth’s crust happens in order to correct an imbalance of weight with respect to Earth’s spin.

 Scientists’ understanding of true polar wander overlaps with their understanding of plate tectonics in various ways. That’s understandable, since it’s all the same Earth.

Scientists delving into true polar wander want to know when, in which direction, and at what rate the Earth’s solid exterior might be rotating due to true polar wander. To sort it out, they say, you would need a stable frame of reference to which observations of relative motion might be compared. Doubrovine and his team say they found one: volcanic hotspots.

Hotspot forming an island chain. As land plates drift, a successive of volcanoes form over the hotspot. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In geology, hotspots are volcanic regions fed by Earth’s underlying mantle. For example, the Hawaiian islands are believed to have formed over a hotspot in the mantle. The hotspot created a volcano, but then – as that land plate drifted over time, as described by the theory of plate tectonics – the volcano drifted, too, and was eventually cut off from the hotspot. Gradually, another volcano begins to form over the hotspot, right next to the first one. And then it moves on … and another one forms … and so on … and so on. Earth’s crust produces first one, then another volcano over the hotspot until a long chain of volcanoes forms, such as in Hawaii. Hotspots have long been used to understand the motion of tectonic plates.

Doubrovine and colleagues went a step further in order to understand true polar wander. Instead of treating the hot spots as static – frozen in place at one spot above Earth’s mantle – their computer model let the hotspots’ positions drift slowly. According to these scientists, this drifting is what produced a model of a stable reference frame, which in turn let them draw conclusions about true polar wander.

They say their model does a good job of matching observations of real hotspot tracks on Earth – the path drawn by each hotspot’s island chain – which gives them confidence their results about true polar wander are accurate.

The Hawaiian islands are believed to have formed over a hotspot – a particularly hot place in Earth’s underlying mantle. Scientists expanded on previous thinking about hotspots to suggest that Earth’s solid surface is drifting, minutely, with respect to our planet’s rotation axis.

Bottom line: German and Norwegian scientists have incorporated hotspots in Earth’s mantle into a computer model being used to study true polar wander. They say their work established a stable reference frame for this study that lets them conclude Earth is undergoing true polar wander today.

car airbags that could save a cyclist's life

car airbags that could save a cyclist's life

In the United States, only 1 percent of trips are made by bicycle. In the Netherlands, which has only 1/18 of the U.S.’s population, that number is close to 26 percent. With so many bikes on the road, Dutch company TNO is working on a car airbag that deploys outside the vehicle to reduce bicyclist injuries. Upon impact, the airbag, housed under the hood, inflates to cover parts of the windshield and cushion a biker. In tests last November, engineers drove a track-guided car into a dummy on a bike at 25 mph, the average speed of a crash. Accelerometers in the dummy’s head and neck and pressure sensors embedded in its limbs indicated brain damage and broken bones. Dummies in collisions with the airbag had fewer and less severe injuries up to 45 percent of the time.

Bionic Man Shows That Most Human Body Parts Could Be Replaced

Bionic Man Shows That Most Human Body Parts Could Be Replaced

He’s not quite Steve Austin, but with prosthetic hands, hips, knees and even a face, Rex is the closest thing to a bionic man that science has yet to produce.

Built by scientists from the Shadow robotics team, Rex is being shown off more as proof that medical science is getting closer to being able to synthesize and stitch together human body parts.

The Shadow team recently unveiled Rex at the Science Museum in London to announce the opening of a new exhibit which will investigate the perception of human identity.

“We were surprised how many of the parts of the body can be replaced,” explained Rich Walker, the managing director of team Shadow, speaking to The Independent.

“There are some vital organs missing, like the stomach, but 60 to 70 percent of a human has effectively been rebuilt.”

For Swiss social psychologist Bertholt Meyer, Rex is the product of a personal journey. Having been born without a left hand, Meyer says medical science is finally at a point where a bionic human is on the horizon.

“I have looked for new bionic technologies out of personal interest for a long time and I think that until five or six years ago nothing much was happening,” Meyer told The Independent. “Suddenly we are at a point where we can build a body that is great and beautiful in its own special way.”

Meyer shares a few characteristics with Rex, namely a prosthetic left hand and a face. The Shadow team had asked Meyer if they could model Rex’s face after his own, resulting in a resemblance which Meyer called “awkward” as he presented Rex to the Science Museum in London.

Though Rex was assembled as a part of a documentary to be aired on BBC’s Channel 4, his internal body parts hail from Australia, the UK and the US. His eyes and kidneys were developed at the University of California. Rex’s eyes are essentially cameras which send images to a microchip located inside the “retina.” These images are then sent to his “brain” by way of electronic pulses, much like the way a human eye perceives things. Rex’s ear was developed at the Macquarie University in Sydney, and sends vibrations via signals to the electronic brain. Rex even has blood pulsing through artificial veins. This blood, developed at Sheffield University, is made from plastic and is completely infection free.

While Rex is the closest any team has ever gotten to building an entirely bionic man, many believe medical science still has a long way to go.

“We have motors which can lift things but, if you want to mimic the dexterity of a hand, we are not there yet,” said professor Steven Hsiao of the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, speaking to the Independent.

“What we are beginning to achieve is building prostheses which look like human body parts, but we are a long way away from making ones which relay sensory information the way the human body does.”

Once medical science improves, as it inevitably will, Meyer says the next step will be tackling the sticky ethical issues which will arise.

“Should I be allowed to cut off my real hand and replace it with something, does that give me an unfair advantage over people who cannot afford this?” asks Meyer.

“I’m not saying that is going to happen but these are questions that should be on the table before that technology becomes available.”

apple imac

apple imac

The ultimate all-in-one. Honed to the cutting edge.

The first iMac was a revolution: An all-in-one computer that put everything — display, processor, graphics, storage, memory, and more — inside one simple, stylish enclosure. Countless innovations later, we’ve raised the bar yet again. The new iMac includes the most advanced, most brilliant desktop display we’ve ever built, and it’s filled with the latest high-performance technologies. Yet it’s just 5 mm thin at its edge with up to 40 percent less volume than the previous generation. To do all that required unprecedented feats of engineering — and imagination. We invented new technologies, pioneered new manufacturing techniques, and devised all-new ways to do more in less space.

 Innovations at the molecular level.

One of the biggest challenges our engineers faced was how to join the front and back of the new iMac. The enclosure is so thin, it’s not possible to weld the pieces using traditional methods. So we searched far and wide for other ideas, and we found one in a process called friction-stir welding. It’s commonly used on airplane wings, rocket booster tanks, and other parts that simply can’t fail. This process uses a combination of intense friction-generated heat and pressure to intermix the molecules of the two aluminum surfaces — creating a seamless, precise, and superstrong join. You may not see it, but the new iMac wouldn’t be possible without it.

 

 Now you’re closer to the action.

The new iMac display is not set behind the cover glass — it’s right up against it. The LCD itself is 5 mm thinner than before, and we used an advanced process called full lamination to eliminate a 2-mm gap between the LCD and the glass, something that has never been done on a display this large. Although it may not seem like much, those few millimeters are enough to make images look as if they’re leaping off the glass.

    Eliminated 2-mm gap
    Antireflective coating
    5-mm-thinner LCD

75 percent less reflection.

Full lamination has a second major benefit: It eliminates the reflection of light off the LCD panel and off the back of the display’s cover glass. But we also figured out how to reduce reflection off the front of the glass without compromising color quality. Instead of applying an antireflective coating to the glass in a conventional way, we adapted a process used on smaller surfaces like camera lenses and fighter pilots’ helmets. It’s called plasma deposition, and it involves coating the glass with layers of silicon dioxide and niobium pentoxide so precise and so thin they’re measured in atoms. The result: an astounding 75 percent reduction in reflectivity — and vibrant, accurate colors.

 Individually calibrated for true-to-life color.

None of these innovations would matter much if the iMac display didn’t deliver vivid, true-to-life color. Which is why we put every single display through an exacting color-calibration process using three state-of-the-art spectroradiometers: one to measure gamma, one to measure white point, and one to check the work of the other two. This equipment is tuned to meet color standards recognized around the world for precision and accuracy.

More energy efficient.

Not only does the new iMac offer higher performance than any previous iMac, it’s also more energy efficient, using up to 50 percent less energy in the idle state with the display on. And its hardware components work hand in hand with the operating system to conserve even more power.
Friendly to the environment.

The environmentally friendly iMac design is free of many harmful toxins, including mercury, arsenic, BFRs, and PVC. It’s also made from materials such as aluminum and glass, which are more likely to be recycled and reused.
Highly rated designs.