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.”

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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?

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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.”

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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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A CBS Radio news report highlighted Armstrong’s new Detroit Office in Milford, MI.

Mayor Bloomberg unveiled New York’s new ‘Midtown in Motion’ traffic system. More from Fast Company:

Midtown in Motion, a $1.6 million real-time traffic management system from NYC’s Department of Transportation, prevents gridlock with a network of sensors and cameras that allows operators to adjust traffic signal patterns on the fly.

Midtown in Motion harnesses 100 microwave sensors as well as 32 traffic video cameras and E-ZPass readers at 23 intersections in a 110-square block area from Second to Sixth Avenues and from 42nd to 57th streets–all to track traffic, congestion, and vehicle travel times. Data from the sensors, cameras, and readers is sent to a control center, where engineers pinpoint “congestion choke points” as they happen and adjust traffic signals accordingly.

Engineers can easily switch between signal patterns, whether that means turning all signals on an avenue green at the same time or staggering traffic light signals on a street. So traffic signals could, for example, be changed to allow for an even distribution of traffic entering Midtown, the theory being that this could prevent crowded areas from becoming even more clogged.

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website maintains important information about transportation safety. In particular, there is a valuable introduction to EDR’s (or Event Data Recorders). Here is an excerpt:

What is an EDR?  What is its purpose?

An Event Data Recorder (EDR) is a function or device installed in a motor vehicle to record technical vehicle and occupant information for a brief period of time (seconds, not minutes) before, during and after a crash for the purpose of monitoring and assessing vehicle safety system performance.  For instance, EDRs may record (1) pre-crash vehicle dynamics and systemstatus, (2) driver inputs, (3) vehicle crash signature, (4) restraint usage/deployment status, and (5) post-crash data such as the activation of an automatic collision notification (ACN) system.

What is the difference between an EDR and a “black box”?

“EDR” is the term NHTSA has coined to refer to the device commonly installed on motor vehicles to record vehicle technical data for a brief period of time in the event of an accident.  In contrast, airplanes, trains, and ships use sophisticated recording devices, known as black boxes, that record data continuously throughout the operation of the vehicle, capture much more data than EDRs, and, and in some cases, can record sound.

Do all types of vehicles have them?  If not, what percentage does?

Not all vehicles are equipped with EDRs.  Most manufacturers have made the decision to install some EDR capabilities in their current vehicles.  It is estimated that about 64% of the 2005 model year passenger vehicles have some EDR capability

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Wired Magazine looks at unique security locations around the world. WikiLeaks, for example:

Where does WikiLeaks keep its secrets? In a former military bunker and nuclear shelter under Stockholm’s city streets. Nicknamed the James Bond Villain Data Center, this 8,000-server facility, which could theoretically withstand a nuclear impact, is protected by 24-hour video surveillance and a 2-foot-thick armored door. Two German V12 diesel submarine engines are on standby for backup power. Recycling a war room comes at a price, though: Bahnhof—the ISP that runs the data center—had to have the glass and frames for the walkway and conference room custom-cut to accommodate the curved walls and uneven ceiling.

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Chris Bangle, the chief of design for BMW Group, shares his thoughts on cars and art. From the TED website:

American designer Chris Bangle explains his philosophy that car design is an art form in its own right, with an entertaining — and ultimately moving — account of the BMW Group’s Deep Blue project, intended to create the SUV of the future.

Michael Seringhaus recently argued in the New York Times to keep everyone’s DNA on file in police databases:

The president was correct in saying that we need a more robust DNA database, available to law enforcement in every state, to “continue to tighten the grip around folks who have perpetrated these crimes.” But critics have a point that genetic police work, like the sampling of arrestees, is fraught with bias. A better solution: to keep every American’s DNA profile on file.

Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of “junk” DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA “fingerprint.”

The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole. Aside from the ability in some cases to determine whether two individuals are closely related, DNA profiles have nothing sensitive to disclose.

But for law enforcement, the profiles are hugely important: DNA samples collected from crime scenes are compared against a standing database of profiles, and matches are investigated. Obviously, the more individuals profiled in the database, the more likely a crime-scene sample can be identified, hence the president’s enthusiasm to expand the nationwide repository.

A counterpoint followed from Mike Habersack in a Letter to the Editor:

Michael Seringhaus’s suggestion that all people in the United States submit DNA to the police sacrifices the bedrock foundation of presumption of innocence for ”fairness.” This goes against more than 200 years of practice and principle in the United States. If fairness were more important, then we would have long ago required all people to submit fingerprints (presumably at birth) to the police.

Why not go one step further and require closed-circuit cameras inside everybody’s home? Would that not help the police even further in solving crime and also being fair?

The problem with this logic is that citizens do not exist to serve the police, but rather the reverse. The obvious answer that serves both fairness, justice and the presumption of innocence is that DNA profiles should be maintained only for those actually convicted of crimes.

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