LeBron James made waves on Twitter when he was spotted commuting to work on a custom mountain bike.
(via StreetsBlog)
January 19, 2012, 2:39 pm
Costa Concordia in Pictures
By Garrick Infanger
The tragic and puzzling wreck of the Costa Concordia is examined by Boston.com and several Reuters photographers.
January 11, 2012, 4:27 pm
Cordon Photo-radar Technology
By Garrick Infanger
Engadget looks at the new Cordon photo-radar technology.
Developed by Simicon, this new speed sensor promises to take highway surveillance to new heights of precision. Unlike most photo radar systems, which track only one violator at a time, Simicon’s device can simultaneously identify and follow up to 32 vehicles across four lanes. Whenever a car enters its range, the Cordon will automatically generate two images: one from wide-angle view and one closeup shot of the vehicle’s license plate. It’s also capable of instantly measuring a car’s speed and mapping its position, and can easily be synced with other databases via WiFi, 3G or WiMAX.
January 9, 2012, 7:02 pm
What Next? Public Parking Auctions
By Garrick Infanger
Wired’s Autopia looks at a new app that auctions public parking spaces.
Parking Auction launched earlier this week on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The matchmaking service is beta-testing, and the folks behind it hope to expand worldwide, creating communities of relaxed, smartphone-armed parkers.
“If I’m parked on the street and wouldn’t mind moving my car to a spot half a mile away that isn’t residential, I may be happy to give it up to my neighbor that just got home from East Hampton on a Sunday night with two kids in a car she has to unload,” said founder Brian Rosetti. “We think that’s quite a neighborly and valuable service.”
To be clear, the spaces themselves aren’t for sale, nor is the right to park in it. Drivers are told they must vacate the space if another driver signals they’d like to park there, thereby voiding the transaction. What’s actually for sale information — the knowledge that a space will be opening up soon. If someone else gets the space before you do, you’re out of luck but you don’t have to pay.
“Both buyers and sellers confirm the space transfer has taken place, and then rates the other, so if the seller leaves before the buyer gets there and someone else pulls into the spot then they will lose the sale,” Rosetti said. “There’s never any interaction between drivers and all confrontation must be avoided.”
January 4, 2012, 1:55 pm
World’s Best Airport Designs
By Garrick Infanger
CNBC looks at the world’s best airports from a design perspective. LaGuardia is not going to make the list…
Denver International Airport
Singapore Changi Airport
Beijing International Airport
January 3, 2012, 12:11 pm
NASCAR Right Turns?
By Garrick Infanger
Freakonomics looks at innovation in NASCAR.
With the exception of a few road course races, most of the NASCAR races are held on ovals. The cars always race counter-clockwise on the ovals, meaning the cars only turn left.
Given all the attention that learning and expertise has been getting, I’m deeply curious as to what would happen if for one race NASCAR went in the opposite direction, so that it was all right turns. I understand that they would probably have to do a lot of work to the cars, because the cars must be optimized for left turns, but put that aside. Would lap times be appreciably worse because the drivers would have trouble cornering? Would there be more crashes? Would the same drivers excel?
December 20, 2011, 8:16 am
Examining Trucking Fuel Efficiency
By admin
Fast Company looks at the fuel efficiency of America’s trucking industry.
“Trailer aerodynamic improvements are much less developed,” the 2009 DOT study reported.”There is little interaction between tractor and trailer manufacturers, and as a result, there has been no effort to treat tractor-trailer aerodynamics as an integrated whole.”
A rectangular metal box, it turns out, may be the worst possible shape to haul down the highway at high speeds. It’s a fashion show of new forms on the road: trailer skirts, trailer tails, and “SuperSingles” all designed to reduce the wind resistance sucking the efficiency out of America’s freight shipping fleet.
The top three trailer makers, Wabash, Utility, and Great Dane, now provide trailer side skirts–panels along the bottom of the trailer which reduce wind resistance and improve mileage, like those on the Walmart truck pictured here–as factory installed options. ATDyanmics manufactures the TrailerTail, which smoothes out the airflow around the back of the trailers, and they’ve reportedly sold about 5,000 (Ed: This number has been corrected from 100,000) in the last 12 months alone.
“There is no more low hanging fruit left for fuel savings in the tractor or cabin, other than that of driver habits,” wrote Babur Ozden, chief operating officer of ATDynamics which makes trailer aerodynamic devices, by email. “Getting another 1% fuel efficiency from the tractor is same as getting 5% from the trailer.”
December 20, 2011, 8:15 am
“The World’s Most Expensive Car Accident”
By Garrick Infanger
Wired.com looks at ‘what the media are calling “the world’s most expensive car accident” and the cops are calling “a gathering of narcissists.”’.
The massive mess destroyed about $3.85 million worth of lustworthy cars and a Toyota Prius late Sunday morning on rain-soaked Chugoku Expressway. The supercars were part of a 20-car convoy heading from Kyushu to Hiroshima when the lead driver, a 60-year-old businessman in a Ferrari F430 Scuderia, lost control on the wet pavement.
“The accident occurred when the driver of a red Ferrari was switching from the right lane to the left and skidded,” Mitsuyoshi Isejima, of the Yamaguchi Prefecture Expressway Traffic Police unit, told Bloomberg. “It was a gathering of narcissists.”
The convoy speeding through the western prefecture of Yamaguchi included an assortment of Ferraris, a LamborghiniDiablo, a Nissan GT-R and a Mercedes-Benz CL 600. These weren’t kids, either. Police said the drivers were all between 37 and 60, and you know they had money — even a used Ferrari runs six figures in Japan, and no more than 500 Ferraris were sold in the country last year.
December 14, 2011, 10:56 am
Cutting Edge Transportation Technology from MIT
By Garrick Infanger
Mashable writes about the Future Urban Mobility project from M.I.T. and Singapore looking at new tools available to address transportation concerns in our growing world. One software is called Live Singapore! and is considered “a convergence of art, digital media and information technology”. Another traffic congestion software is called DynaMIT.
So what does it do? DynaMIT provides short-term predictions of congestion in a specific traffic network and then attempts to anticipate congestion before it occurs. DynaMIT uses a mash-up of real-time and historical traffic data for a given area and operates on a continuous basis to not only analyze real-time information, such as from traffic sensors, but add a behavioral model to show the potential impacts of human reaction to the data received (i.e. gaper’s block). The output offers a prediction for a “short horizon” and essentially simulates a network of transportation for an hour into the future every five minutes, completing each simulation in about a minute. The simulations are run faster than real-time using both parallel and distributed computing. The system utilizes “network decomposition” — a traffic network is divided into sub-networks that are then simulated on multiple processors. This kind of work couldn’t be done without modern computer methods.
“DynaMIT allows us to look into the future and see what the travel times, speeds and bottlenecks will be in the next hour,” explains Ben-Akiva. “If we develop and broadcast information about future traffic conditions, it will affect the behavior and as a result, will affect what will happen in the future and invalidate the prediction unless we take that in account.”
December 7, 2011, 9:40 am
Visualizing Skyscrapers
By Garrick Infanger
Wired Magazine looks at a new book visualizing the effect of skyscrapers.
Kate Ascher’s 2005 book, The Works: Anatomy of a City, was essentially a wiring diagram of the city of New York—every city, really—intricately detailing the mechanics of urban infrastructure. (You’ll never be more enthralled by a sewage-system infographic.) Now Ascher’s back with another eye-widening piece of illustrated deconstruction, this one on the most enduring symbol of city life—The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper. “I love the complexity of cities and their total dependence on the invisible systems that keep them running. Skyscrapers are cities in the sky,” she says. The Heights features more than 200 pages of explanations, diagrams, and remarkable stories. It wasn’t easy to pick just one, but we aimed high.
December 5, 2011, 10:01 am
When Vehicles Communicate
By Garrick Infanger
Fast Company looks at when vehicles communicate.
Traffic is generally accepted as a necessity of modern life, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t have traffic because there are too many cars, we have traffic because people are bad drivers and don’t have enough information to make smart decisions. If even just a fraction of vehicles could communicate and override poor driving decisions, we could virtually eliminate traffic. So regardless of whether you believe that autonomous vehicles and road trains are in our future, cars that talk to each other are coming sooner than you think–and they might just get rid of some of the most pesky (and dangerous) traffic-related problems.
Clemson’s Integrated Intelligent Transportation Platform proposes using DSRC to create a “true connected vehicle ecosystem” that leverages the technology to do everything from reporting vehicle crashes on the road ahead to notifying EV drivers that they’re about to enter a traffic jam, and their charge won’t last through it unless they turn off certain systems in the car–for example, the onboard TV in the backseat.
The Connected Vehicle Proactive Driving entry, submitted by Sakura Associates, aims to use DSRC to make the roads safer for drivers–and in turn, reduce the amount of traffic jams caused by accidents. The system would gather information on the type and location of accidents in different areas to give drivers guidance based on a so-called Accident Probability Index, which could advise drivers to avoid (or take extra care on) routes with high accident rates, “dangerous road geometry,” and adverse weather conditions.
December 1, 2011, 3:54 pm
Armstrong Featured by Gannett News
By Garrick Infanger
Brian T. Weaver, P.E. and Steve A. Rundell, Ph.D., P.E., featured in a Gannett news article regarding the new Detroit Office.
This engineering application known as “injury causation analysis” can be explained in simple terms, said Weaver: “In order to understand the injury, you have to understand the event.”
Yet there’s no denying the complexity of what they do, what they know and what they need to find out. Studying automobile collisions calls for analyzing evidence of speed and other factors to match them with the severity of an impact, for example. Or perhaps a case requires investigating how a bone broke in an accident or the effects of a faulty spinal implant, tapping into a solid knowledge of biomechanics — which applies mechanical engineering principles to biological systems. It’s about keen intuition, an eye for detail and the ability to communicate findings clearly.
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