"Can we coordinate everything and be able to send overall directives and guidance and sensor data reliably all the time to, let‘s say, tens of thousands or a million different mobile entities..."Self-driving Cars Heading Our Way
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Self Driving Cars
IBM Sequoia
Chances are, the quad-core processor powering your desktop computer or high-end laptop is vastly underworked. But it’s not your fault: Writing code that executes in parallel is difficult, so most consumer applications (save for some compute-intensive video games that really need help, for example) continue to run on just one core at a time. Which makes it all the more impressive that a group of Stanford researchers recently ran a jet-engine-noise simulation across 1 million cores simultaneously...
GIGAOM
Amazon still doesn't make a profit
Amazon also reported its total sales for 2012 topped $61 billion, up $13 billion from last year. In 2007, Amazon’s annual net sales were $14.84 billion. In other words, Amazon’s sales have quadrupled over the past five years. But profit? Not so much. Amazon ended 2012 with a $39 million loss on the year, which the company blamed on the cost of delivering all the stuff it sells, as well as on the price of digital content...
Amazon’s Growth Looks Like Walmart in the 1990s — But Even Better
100ft Wave, new record?
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Garrett McNamara on what is being hyped as the 100-foot wave. Photo: Tó Mané courtesy of Billabong XXL
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Surf Mag
Persistent Surveillance
Thank you Science!
Once mounted on a drone, Argus can fly around and record video from an altitude of 17,500 feet. The view is breathtaking. And we’re talking the take-your-breath-away-because-this-is-so-frightening kind of breathtaking. While keeping tabs on a 15-square-mile swath of ground, Argus allows operators to zoom in on up to 65 different people in real-time. It can see you walking down the sidewalk. It can see what you’re wearing. It can see what you’re doing with your arms. It can see when you stop to tie your shoe. Getting this kind of resolution from this altitude is unprecedented.View from the World’s Most Advanced Surveillance Drone
East Coast Prefab
Blu Homes just opened the first ever Breezehouse on the East Coast, in an upstate New York town called Copake.
Read more: PHOTOS: Blu Homes Opens East Coast's First Michelle Kaufmann Designed Prefab Breezehouse in Copake, NY | Inhabitat New York City
Read more: PHOTOS: Blu Homes Opens East Coast's First Michelle Kaufmann Designed Prefab Breezehouse in Copake, NY | Inhabitat New York City
Smart House, Smart Grid
While we are focused on the shiny advancements in self-driving cars, Denmark is busy making signifcant progress in smart electric grid and smart home technology.
"Let’s see some of the technical solutions that we have. If you, for example, open a window—there‘s no heat on—but if you open it, there’s a switch here that says “window is open.” Then the computer knows, I will turn off the heat. You don’t have to turn it off. This is the meter. Somebody might call it a smart meter. To say it in another word, this one knows the clock, knows the time. The old ones didn’t know what time the energy was used. This one, every 5 minutes looks at and analyzes the energy consumption..."Spectrum Podcast: Danish Island Tests Smart Grid
Success requires 9% attrition
This is interesting. Tom Ricks suggests that there might be a natural rate at which successful organizations trim fat.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Our Grid
"We sometimes joke that if Alexander Graham Bell woke up tomorrow and saw my phone, he'd be astounded," says David Manning, executive director of the New York State Smart Grid Consortium. "If Thomas Edison woke up tomorrow and saw the grid, he could not only recognize it, he could probably fix it."How to save the electric grid
Monday, January 28, 2013
Start your own insurance company
This ongoing quest led to Horowitz’s creation of the Freelancers Insurance Company, which now provides health coverage for close to 25,000 New Yorkers and is approaching $100 million in revenues. Along the way, Horowitz has received countless personal accolades. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1999, and in December was named to the New York Federal Reserve Bank board of directors. What’s her secret—how did she transform a goal into a successful battle plan?
Don’t Have Health Insurance? Start Your Own Insurance Company!
is an MBA worth it?
Bottom line is that graduates of the top US programs in the mid 1990s tripled their salaries in five years on average, but grads from the same schools saw half that increase in 2008 and 2009...GigaOM
Americas best dance crew
Fred Astaire once called this performance “the greatest dance number ever filmed.” Mikhail Baryshnikov said, “Those guys are perfect examples of pure genius.”Mental Floss
Robot Cars compliment the auto industry
So quite sensibly, Muller states that “Instead of Google vs. Detroit” she sees “a new era of collaboration” between tech companies such as Google and conventional automakers like General Motors. And these collaborations could genuinely provide transportation with is not only safer, but more fuel-efficient. Far from posing a threat, is quite exciting.
Why Google's Autonomous Cars Probably Won't Kill the Auto Industry
the Power of Leadership
This story won't surprise anyone. We all understand the importance of leadership, but the commentor's clear and concise description made it post-worthy.
Good Boss vs. Bad Boss output
MLB Manager's troubles and strength
Cardinals manager Mike Matheny was a four-time Gold-Glove catcher over 13 years in the big leagues. But a decade ago, he didn’t figure his future was in baseball.
He was banking on real estate.
One series of failed investments has now ended that dream. Nine days ago, a judge ruled against Matheny on the project, placing the responsibility for more than $4 million in debt on him and his wife. Interest and court costs could drive the price even higher.
But the saga that could ruin Matheny financially is the same one that brought him back to the Cardinals, and a new career in baseball...
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sales Tax vs Gas Tax
McDonnell proposes to decouple use of the transportation system from taxation to pay for it. In essence, this means raising taxes on those who drive little—or not at all—to subsidize those who drive a lot. This is a disturbing idea from an equity perspective, since unsurprisingly the wealthy are far more likely to own cars and drive lots of miles than the poor...This proposal is also troubling from the perspective of economic efficiency. The obvious reason is that it no longer provides a behavioral signal to discourage driving. Don’t get me wrong, auto travel has tremendous individual benefits, but as I’ve written in the past, collectively we overindulge in it because drivers create all sorts of costs that are borne by society and for which they don’t directly pay (e.g. pollution, congestion, much of the cost of accidents, and road damage)...
Military Skills
And this is where we find the defining characteristic of the strategic thought leaders throughout the ages. It is an intellectual curiosity punctuated by a desire to learn as much as possible from as many people as possible in as many areas as possible as often as possible.SWJ: Intellectual Curiosity and the Military Officer
You have to want to learn to learn. If you are intellectually curious, you will go in search of answers – often finding them where you least expect them, growing wiser along the way. Your curiosity will lead you to discover the world is more than either Mechanical Engineering or International Relations. It is the complex interaction of both, and more...
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Blackwater of the Seas
"Anthony Sharp, a 50-year-old veteran of tech startups, grew up with a love for ships. On February 7, he’ll turn that boyhood affection into what might be the first private navy since the 19th century. Sharp’s newest company, Typhon, will offer a fleet of armed ex-Royal Marines and sailors to escort commercial ships through pirate-infested waters. In essence, Typhon wants to be the Blackwater of the sea, minus the stuff about accidentally killing civilians..."
Exum on SOF (and Zero Dark Thirty)
"What won't change is the enduring value of SOF as a "strategic asset"--defined not necessarily as a tool that necessarily has intrinsically "strategic" qualities but one that delivers a certain kind of effect with a unique and rare meaning for strategy. That meaning must be appreciated, lest SOF is squandered in missions that do not play to its unique strengths or seen as a panacea. "Great Raids and Great Disasters
There's a first for everything
I think this is the first time that I have fundamentally disagreed with a Freakonomics post. In We once had self-driving cars,
These statements are surprising considering this previous post:
These statements are surprising considering this previous post:
TMQ: Ravens, Patriots
Interesting analysis from the Tuesday Morning QB:
Sweet Play of the Title Round: Leading 14-13 on the first play of the fourth quarter, Baltimore faced first-and-goal on the Flying Elvii 3. The quarters had just changed -- the Ravens had gone from playing with the wind, to against the wind. New England stacked the line expecting a power rush. Flacco play-faked and threw into the 28 mph gusts to Anquan Boldin, who came from the slot and wrestled the ball away from two defenders. Suddenly Baltimore leads 21-13 in the fourth quarter and a reversal of the Ravens' title-game fortunes seems likely. Sweet.
Sour Play of the Title Round: Ravens leading 28-13 with nine minutes remaining, New England has fourth-and-4 on the Baltimore 19. Having strangely punted three times in Baltimore territory -- see more below -- Bill Belichick decides to go for it.
Tom Brady is flushed from the pocket, rolls left, and has a decent chance to gain the first down by running. But perhaps he knows Baltimore is furious that at the end of the first half, running in the same spot on the field, he started to slide, then raised his foot high and seemed to try to injure Baltimore's Ed Reed with his spikes. The Ravens were furious about that play -- and Brady may know that it means the next time he becomes a runner, the Ravens will reply with no-holds-barred hits. Brady doesn't want to be hit hard, so he throws the ball away. He throws the ball away on fourth down! Sour.
Defending Armstrong
"Why my dad, a former Olympic bicycle racer, sympathizes with the disgraced former Tour de France champion"
A Former Cyclist Reflects: I Would Have Done What Lance Armstrong Did
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Modern Warfare is a Thinking Officer's Game
The military would benefit from more officers with hard science backgrounds enabling them to solve the challenging problems the military faces in modern wars.
Entrepreneur Buys the N.Y.S.E.
Pretty interesting version of the rags to riches story:
A bold deal by the owner of Intercontinental Exchange to acquire the New York Stock Exchange shows how technology is transforming the world’s markets.Jeffrey Sprecher’s Improbable Path to Buying the N.Y.S.E.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Outsourced (not how you think)
"Bob was his company’s best software developer, got glowing performance reviews and earned more than $250,000 a year... Bob was paying a Chinese firm about $50,000 a year to do his work, then spent the day surfing the web, watching cat videos and updating his Facebook page."
How a 'model' employee got away with outsourcing his software job to China
Tred
A better way to buy cars:
I think this is genius. And it is going to take off in a big way.
Putting up with unctuous, commission-crazed salespeople when buying a new car could become a relic. Seattle-based startup Tred brings new cars to your home or office for test-drives and online purchase, without ever visiting a dealership showroom... Tred makes it so that you can research, choose, and test drive from the comfort of your couch.
Here’s how it works. You go to Tred’s website or iPad app to research and select several cars you want to test drive at a place of your choosing. Tred staffers, not car dealership salespeople, then deliver your pick of cars... If Tred comes to your house, you can see how the cars fit in your garage, handle on the roads you drive every day, and if they can easily accommodate your twins’ car seats. You can also do side-by-side comparisons of different manufacturers’ cars, something most car dealerships aren’t set up to handle.Wired
I think this is genius. And it is going to take off in a big way.
Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC)
ESOC identifies, compiles, and analyzes micro-level conflict data and information on insurgency, civil war, and other sources of politically motivated violence worldwide. ESOC was established in 2008 by practitioners and scholars concerned by the significant barriers and upfront costs that challenge efforts to conduct careful sub-national research on conflict.SWJ
Compound Interest in real life
"As ADHD has become one of the most prevalent childhood mental conditions, it is useful to understand the full set of consequences of the illness. This paper uses a longitudinal national sample, including sibling pairs, to show important labor market outcome consequences of ADHD. The employment reduction is between 10-14 percentage points, the earnings reduction is approximately 33%, and the increase in social assistance is 15 points, which are larger than many estimates of the black-white earnings gap and the gender earnings gap. A small share of the link is explained by education attainments and co-morbid health conditions and behaviors. The results also show important differences in labor market consequences by family background and age of onset. These findings, along with similar research showing that ADHD is linked with poor education outcomes and adult crime, suggest that treating childhood ADHD can substantially increase the acquisition of human capital..."
How Is Early-Childhood Intervention Like Compound Interest?
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Book: The World Until Yesterday
Tribal LessonsThe custom among the Pirahã Indians of Brazil is that women give birth alone. The linguist Steve Sheldon once saw a Pirahã woman giving birth on a beach, while members of her tribe waited nearby. It was a breech birth, however, and the woman started crying in agony. “Help me, please! The baby will not come.” Sheldon went to help her, but the other Pirahã stopped him, saying that she didn’t want his help. The woman kept up her screams. The next morning both mother and baby were found dead.
Shabaab French Hostage
Shabaab, al Qaeda's affiliate in Somalia and East Africa, announced today that it would execute a French intelligence operative who was captured in Mogadishu in 2009. The hostage, Denis Allex, was the subject of a failed rescue attempt last week by French commandos. Shabaab said he was killed after the group "reached a unanimous decision."
Cyanide mystery
I’m talking of course, about the murderer of dry-cleaning owner Urooj Khan who died on July 20, just one day after the Illinois lottery issued him a check for some $425,000.
The Chicago Tribune broke the poison news last week. Khan’s death was first judged a natural one. He had died unexpectedly during the night. Yes, he was only 46 but he was overweight, imperfectly healthy, and the cause of death was given as heart disease. The standard toxicology screen, which checked for common exposures such as narcotics and carbon monoxide, was clear.
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro: A Gun Ban That Misfired
...As a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who enforced firearms and ammunition cases while a severe local gun ban was still in effect, I am skeptical of the benefits that many imagine will result from additional gun-control efforts. I dislike guns, but I believe that a nationwide firearms crackdown would place an undue burden on law enforcement and endanger civil liberties while potentially increasing crime...Read the rest: WSJ
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Army of None
In early 2011 The Atlantic published an article (Why Our Best Officers are Leaving) that instigated an internet-wide discussion on officer retention in the US military. Tim Kane, the author, now has a book out that explores the topic further. An article adapted from the book was recently published in Foreign Policy. In the article, Kane illustrates the Army's retention troubles by telling the story of LTC Richard Hewitt--a rising star who surprised everyone by declining battalion command and retiring.
Dick Hewitt was the head of Econ when I was a cadet. I can’t remember if I was in one or two of his classes but I liked him and considered him a mentor. I have vivid memories of LTC Hewitt's class and of specific discussions we had about the Iraq war during the invasion (the course was personal finance).
Teacher Grades
A New Study Claims To Figure Out How To Correctly Evaluate TeachersWhether or not a teacher is good (and the right way to determine that) is the major issue in education today. How to figure out how to incorporate test scores, teachers’ classroom manner, and any number of other factors into a holistic measurement of teacher ability has stymied everyone. But the end result of a three-year study by the Gates Foundation in schools around the country claims to have an answer:
The most reliable way to evaluate teachers is to use a three-pronged approach built on student test scores, classroom observations by multiple reviewers and teacher evaluations from students themselves. … Researchers videotaped 3,000 participating teachers and experts analyzed their classroom performance. They also ranked the teachers using a statistical model known as value-added modeling, which calculates how much an educator has helped students learn based on their academic performance over time. And finally, the researchers surveyed the students, who turned out to be reliable judges of their teacher’s abilities.
They then took students, randomized them, and assigned them to different teachers. Teachers who had been good one year managed to replicate the results, and their students not only did better on standardized tests but also "complicated tests of their conceptual math knowledge and reading and writing abilities."
Monday, January 14, 2013
Tide for Crack
Tide detergent: Works on tough stains. Can now also be traded for crack. A case study in American ingenuity, legal and otherwise
The call that came in from a local Safeway one day in March 2011 was unlike any the Organized Retail Crime Unit of the Prince George’s County Police Department had fielded before. The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly. But in every incident the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team. When Thompson and his officers arrived to investigate, they stumbled onto another apparent Tide theft in progress and busted two men who’d piled 100 or so of the bright-orange jugs into their Honda. The next day, Thompson returned to the store’s parking lot to tape a television interview about the crimes. A different robber took advantage of the distraction to make off with twenty more bottles...
Suds for Drugs
Brennan Confirmation questions
“How much evidence does the President need to determine that a particular American can be lawfully killed?” Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, asks in the letter, acquired by Danger Room. “Does the President have to provide individual Americans with the opportunity to surrender before killing them?”
Senator Asks CIA Nominee When Drones Can Kill Americans
Revise and Rewrite
"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." —Elmore Leonard, Newsweek, 1985
Great Writers on the Art of Revision
Driving toward a robot car future
Someday soon, few drivers will have to worry about car crashes and collisions, whether on congested roads or on empty highways, technology companies and car manufacturers are betting. But even now, drivers are benefiting from a suite of safety systems, and many more are in development to transform driving from a manual task to something more akin to that of a conductor overseeing an orchestra.
Drivers With Hands Full Get a Backup: The Car
Friday, January 11, 2013
Mystery of the Gun Internet Star
Mr. Ratliff’s passion for firearms made him something of a celebrity on the Internet, where he helped make scores of videos about high-powered and exotic guns and explosives. His YouTube channel, called FPSRussia, became the site’s ninth largest, with nearly 3.5 million subscribers and more than 500 million views.But last week, the authorities said, Mr. Ratliff, 32, ended up on the wrong end of a gun. The police in northeast Georgia found him dead at his office on Jan. 3, shot once in the head. He was surrounded by several guns, but not the one that killed him. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is treating it as a homicide.
Gun Enthusiast With Popular Online Videos Is Shot to Death in Georgia
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
the War on Drugs
After more than four decades of a failed experiment, the human cost has become too high. It is time to consider the decriminalization of drug use and the drug market...
Have We Lost the War on Drugs?
Business Smart Security
And so, to confront one of the newest and most damaging crimes, it turned to one of the oldest tricks in human history: deception.To thwart hackers, firms salting their servers with fake data
Timeline: Explore some of the technological advances that led to cyberspace and some examples of notable hacks.
The Waseca, Minn., company began planting fake data in Web servers to lure hackers into “rabbit holes” in the hopes of frustrating them into giving up. The bait was varied — including bogus user log-ins and passwords and phony system configuration files. Anyone who took it was being watched by Brown, their computer locations tagged and their tactics recorded.
A new Bank
Like many people, Josh Reich got fed up with his bank after it charged him overdraft fees and he endured painful customer service calls to fight them. But unlike most people, Mr. Reich, a software engineer from Australia, decided to come up with a better way to bank.
Mr. Reich and a co-founder, Shamir Karkal, created Simple, an online banking start-up company based in Portland, Ore., that offers its customers free checking accounts and data-rich analysis of their transactions and spending habits...
A Financial Service for People Fed Up With Banks
Audi robot car tech
The company reveals that it is testing driverless cars on Nevada freeways, and shows a compact laser scanner intended to fit such technology into commercial vehicles.
Audi Shrinks the Autonomous Car
iPhone Contract
http://www.janellburleyhofmann.com/gregorys-iphone-contract/
12/25/2012
12/25/2012
Dear Gregory
Merry Christmas! You are now the proud owner of an iPhone. Hot Damn! You are a good & responsible 13 year old boy and you deserve this gift. But with the acceptance of this present comes rules and regulations. Please read through the following contract. I hope that you understand it is my job to raise you into a well rounded, healthy young man that can function in the world and coexist with technology, not be ruled by it. Failure to comply with the following list will result in termination of your iPhone ownership.
I love you madly & look forward to sharing several million text messages with you in the days to come.
1. It is my phone. I bought it. I pay for it. I am loaning it to you. Aren’t I the greatest?
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Toyota Goes Timidly into the Future
LAS VEGAS — “We believe the driver should always be in control of the vehicle,” Jim Pisz, Toyota’s corporate manager of North American business strategy, told Wired, and that is all you need to know about the automaker’s plans for autonomous vehicles. Toyota is being cautious. Calculated. And in typical fashion, reserved.
Toyota and its luxurious sibling Lexus showed off their “advanced active safety research vehicle” Monday morning at CES, and it packs some cool tech. The LS600h sports high-def cameras, advanced GPS, radar and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) laser tracking systems similar to those on Google’s autonomous Toyota Prius hybrids and Lexus RX SUVs. But this isn’t a collaboration between the two industry titans. Toyota and its Ann Arbor, Michigan-based team are going it alone for a reason.
Instead of creating a fully autonomous vehicle, Toyota is taking a similar – if less ambitious — route than its German rivals. While Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi have committed to offering some kind of low-speed autonomous driving system on their next generation of vehicles, Toyota is taking a more conservative, layered approach...
Toyota Inches Oh So Cautiously Toward Autonomous Tech
Monday, January 7, 2013
Iranian MOIS
In February 2010, Iranian spies had Tehran’s most wanted man in their sights. Their target, Sunni Islamist militant Abdolmalek Rigi, had killed an Iranian general and was responsible for a string of terrorist attacks in Iran from across the Pakistani border. After Rigi boarded a commercial flight to Dubai that took him through Iranian airspace, secret agents on board appeared, ordered the plane to land, and then arrested Rigi. He was later executed.
That’s just one operation in recent years by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS. According to a new report by the Federal Research Division at the Library of Congress, the spy agency counts as “the most powerful and well-supported ministry among all Iranian ministries” (.pdf) in terms of finances and support. The report, first obtained by Bill Gertz at The Washington Free Beacon, describes a 30,000 strong army of spies — the largest intelligence agency in the Middle East — responsible for assassinating political opponents, espionage, and, above all, crushing potential rivals to Tehran’s ruling elite.
Iranian Spies
Cisco and NXP bet on robot cars
Cisco and NXPs’ entrance into the autonomous vehicle market is particularly telling though because of their expertise in traditional networking and radio communications. Car-to-car networks are essentially gigantic meshes, which Cisco builds everyday. Meanwhile NXP’s forte is radio modules. The wireless links that will connect cars are based on the same Wi-Fi technologies that connect our laptops and tablets.GigaOm
Friday, January 4, 2013
Teddy Roosevelt challenge
In 1908, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt wanted to make sure that his military officers were in good shape, so he issued an executive order — make ‘em walk 50 miles, he said, “and for the last half-mile double-time 200 yards, rest 30 seconds; double time 200 yards, rest 30 seconds and sprint the last 200 years to the finish line as proof of their fitness.”
Read more here
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