Olaf van Kooten, a professor of horticulture at Wageningen University who has observed the project but has no stake in it,
#Van Kooten says, but more research is needed and people need to get used to the idea of sunless, landless agriculture.
#With initiatives such as using otherwise idle school buses to take seniors grocery shopping, the World health organization recognizes New york as a leader in this movement.
#In East Harlem, a yellow school bus pulls up to a curb and 69-year-old Jenny Rodriguez climbs off.
The bus had dropped already a load of kids at school. Now, before the afternoon trip home, it is shuttling older adults to a market where they flock to fresh fruits and vegetables.
Rodriguez usually goes shopping on foot, pulling along a small cart. It can be a hike.
youre pushing the shopping cart and almost go flying, #Rodriguez said, examining sweet potatoes that she pronounced fresher and cheaper than at her usual store.
#More than 200 times, school buses have taken older adults from senior centers to supermarkets in different neighborhoods.
700 bus shelters to give waiting seniors a place to rest. The citys aging taxi fleet is scheduled to be replaced by a boxier model designed to be easier for older riders
and people with disabilities to open the doors and slide in and out. On the Upper West side, seniors snapped up a report card of grocery stores deemed age-friendly
Cities and suburbs were designed for younger people, full of stairs and cars, he explained. As they become increasingly difficult to navigate, older people gradually retreat.
Efforts are under way in six metro areas, including work to adapt zoning codes to allow more of a walkable mix of housing and retail.
planned senior housing and a bus stop. One town pilot-tested a shuttle for seniors to supplement barebones public transit.
safer sidewalk to the bus stop and more time for pedestrians to cross the street. The overall move isnt without controversy.
access to shopping, green space, more freedom from the car. The idea is a mix of ages
with safer steps and places to walk apart from bikers. To sustain momentum, Clark created Genphilly,
an initiative that helped bring about more handicapped-accessible cars for the citys light-rail system,
The list includes Sears, Sony Pictures, American Apparel, Nokia, Saab, A&w All-American Foods Restaurants, Soap opera Digest, Sony Ericsson, Myspace,
Car rental chain Dollar Thrifty is still entertaining buyout offers from Avis and Hertz. On June 6
the embattled company recommended that its shareholders not accept Hertzs recent offer, valued at $2. 24 billion,
Meanwhile, on June 13th, Avis Budget announced that it had made progress in its discussion with the Federal trade commission regarding its potential acquisition#of the company.
Pontiac, a major car brand since 1926, is gone, shut down by a struggling GM. Blockbuster is in the process of dismantling,
Subway has 35,000 locations worldwide, and Mcdonalds has nearly as many. A&w does not have the ability to market itself against these chains and at least a dozen other fast food operators like Burger king.
and transportation cost compared to competitors many times as large. 3. Saab The first Saab car was launched in 1949 by Swedish industrial firm Svenska Aeroplan.
The firm produced a series of sedans and coups the flagship of which was the 900 series,
Saabs engineering reputation and the rise in its international sales attracted GM to buy half the company in 1989 and the balance in 2000.
Saabs problem, which grew under the management of the worlds No. 1 automobile manufacturer, was that it was never more than a niche brand in an industry dominated by very large players such as Ford and Chevrolet.
It did not build very inexpensive cars like VW did, or expensive sports cars as Porsche did.
Saabs models were in price and features, up against models from the worlds largest car companies that sold hundreds of thousands of units each year.
Saab also did not have a wide number of models to suit different budgets and driver tastes.
GM decided to jettison the brand in late 2008, and the small company quickly became insolvent.
Saab finally found a buyer in high-end car maker Spyker which took control of the company last year.
Spyker quickly ran low on money because only 32,000 Saabs were sold in 2010. Spyker turned to Chinese industrial investors for money.
Pang Da Automobile agreed to take an equity stake in the company. But the agreement is not binding,
and with a potential of global sales which are still below 50,000 a year based on manufacturing and marketing operations and demand,
Saab is no longer a financially viable brand. 4. American Apparelthe once-hip retailer reached the brink of bankruptcy earlier this year,
and there is no indication that it has gained anything more than a little time with its latest financing.
truck, and motorcycle publications, has little reason to support a product based on a dying industry. 10.
Improve your odds by joining a gym#mokers who are trying to quit often fall off the wagon during stressful moments.
Youre a great driver? Not surprising that you think so. According to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 72 percent of drivers regard themselves as more skilled than everyone else.
Researchers trace the bias to a fundamental information imbalance, namely that the poorest performers are also the least able to recognize skill (or lack of skill) in themselves or others.
These guys make Evel Knievel look like a defensive driver. What you can do about it:
The Capital Crescent Trail, a hard-surface trail from Georgetown to Bethesda, MD, developed on an abandoned rail bed, is a great bike trip that is off the beaten track.
Jogging and bike paths wind around 13 miles of shoreline earning Minneapolis the designation of being a Bike Friendly City from the League of American Bicyclists.
Also a cultural hot spot, Minneapolis is home to the Hennepin Theatre stages, which hosts Kids Nights performances (The Lion king debuted here before heading to Broadway).
Madison gets the green#light for loads of bike trails lakes, food co-ops, and farmers markets, including Dane County Farmers Market at Capitol Square, held Saturdays at the foot of the statehouse.
but the survey excludes housing, utilities, car purchases, and school fees, which can vary widely
$21. 70 Japans second-largest city after Tokyo, Yokohama is reached easily from Tokyo by train.
Yokohama has nine main business districts and exports many cars and auto parts. No. 6: Zurich Quick lunch:
The U s. Department of transportation estimates that the white-tailed deer alone kills around 130 Americans each year simply by causing car accidents.
the predator#deer had a banner year, causing 211 human deaths in car wrecks. In the U s. there are about 1. 5 million deer/vehicle collisions annually,
Evolutionary theory would lead us to believe that given the confrontational nature of deer and cars,
where the number of dead birds found stuck in the grills of cars has dropped dramatically over the past few decades.
then logically they would become aware of the dangers of running in front of cars. Nearly all other animal species have learned to avoid cars,
so it seems reasonable that deer must simply be missing something. In fact, if we push this line of thinking to the comical extreme
and changed from deer-crossing#signs to car-crossing#signs for the deer to read.
Flying cars, cures for cancer, the first person on Mars, teleportation, and space hotels are all persistent concepts that drive the energies of people on earth.
Manufacturing has been a key driver of economic growth since the recession ended. That continued last month, even with supply chain disruptions stemming from the crisis in Japan.
Toyota recently offered a free program on Cydias store, promoting the companys Scion sedan. Once installed, the car is displayed on the background of the iphone home screen,
and the iphone icons are refashioned to look like the emblem on the front grill. Toyota was also the first major corporation to offer an ad to the jailbreaking site, www. modmyi. com,
whose traffic and revenue have doubled since 2010. Weve seen expansion across the board. The Toyota ad and theme, to me, meant there was a turning of the tides
and that jailbreaking is becoming more mainstream,##said Kyle Matthews, the co-owner of Modmyi. com. The industry just keeps increasing;
there are even repair stores that will jailbreak for you.##Apple and AT&T have been trying to crack down on the booming black market.
Matthews said Apple pressed Toyota to remove the theme and the ad this past week,
preferring to hide in peoples personal belongings and in cars. The bugs probably got to the USA in the late 1990s by hitchhiking in container ships from Asia.
Push a cart down a supermarket aisle, and youll pass a kaleidoscope of color. The use of artificial dyes by foodmakers is up by half since 1990,
And in Japan, people have been swiping phones at convenience stores and bus stations for several years. Other global markets may have a single dominant mobile carrier
and emotional status. Red Bulls effects are appreciated throughout the world by top athletes, busy professionals, active students and drivers on long journeys,#the website claims.
and participating in risky hobbies like motorcycle riding. The head of the Cleveland Clinic was praised both
Barry realized he couldnt find his car...Nothing says gross supermarket#quite like kiwi fruit with hairy backs...
#In the future, Your Car May be made of Mushrooms Video games have long been using mushrooms as a source for power, energy and advancement.
In the future, mushrooms may be as common in cars as they are on pizza. Believe it or not,
scientists who are trying to find more sustainable ways to build car parts believe the answers may be found in things such as mushroom roots.
#which aired on Wednesday 2/2, focuses on the new discoveries that scientists such as Deborah Mielewski, the technical leader of plastics research at Ford motor Co.,
Mielewski says Ford has been working to find a way to reduce the use of petroleum plastics since 2000,
and Ford decided to jump on the green trend with some success. Currently, as much as 10 percent of car parts that are made typically from petroleum plastics can now be made from soy-based polyurethane foams or bioplastic.#
#In fact, the 2011 Ford fiesta uses bioplastic not only in soft foam seats but also for hard plastic surfaces like the dashboard.
New york times science writer David Pogue, who is hosting the show, drove one of the Fiestas with foam made from soy beans
and they are wrapped in vinyl like other car seats.##Mielewski said that the current soy-based polyurethane foam used in the Fiesta had to match up with all the specs that the old foam did,
#Green plastics are a growing part of the car market, and Mielewski says it may be possible to actually grow car parts.
She says scientists at Ford are experimenting by mixing some mushroom roots together with other plant matter, like wheat straw,
and putting the mixture into a mold shaped like a car part. The mushroom car parts are a ways off from being introduced into cars,
but Pogue believes they will not only change how parts are manufactured, but also style as well. LINK Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati swfobject. embedswf (http://www. youtube. com/v/5b6ab7kovha&
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textile rolls and food-processing equipment, says he can barely find machinists who know how to handle manual machines.
#Sometimes, Armey trains unskilled people, a decision that he bases on the vibe he gets
One left the firm to be a truck driver. But the other is now an assistant foreman.
So what if you could sample that cashmere coat from your cell phone before adding it to your shopping cart?
Texture data fed into a machine s piezoelectric drivers can re-create vibrations and temperature on a touch screen can simulate that feel,
Some of this capability is available now in rudimentary form in computer games where the controller shakes to indicate an on-screen car collision. 2. Seeing the forest,
if a cell phone caller is in a car with an engine running at 2, 000 rpm,
if the driver is stuck in traffic or moving smoothly,#Meyerson said. By embedding sensors in flood prone areas,
but is better for them. 5. A nose that knows Breath analysis can do drunk more than keep drivers off the road.
riding bikes, from running water etc. There is early traction there. Los angeles is testing advanced flywheel technology as a way to reap wasted energy from braking trains
and re-apply it when trains accelerate. And Pavegen is building sidewalk tiles designed to capture energy from walking pedestrians.
They sold one of their cars, gave some possessions to relatives and sold others in a yard sale, rented out their six-bedroom house
as varied as developers and U. P. S. drivers. That number rose 39 percent in less than a year.
and bought a three-bedroom house and a 1951 Chevrolet. One day in 1976, Moraitis felt short of breath.
I drove a Chevrolet. But I was always in a hurry.##When she and her family moved to Ikaria
The argument that organic produce is more nutritious has never been major driver#in why people choose to pay more,
A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution.
#said Frans van Houten, Philips s chief executive. The window of opportunity to bring manufacturing back is before that happens.#
The next generation of robots for manufacturing will be more flexible and easier to train. Witness the factory of Tesla Motors,
which recently began manufacturing the Tesla S, a luxury sedan, in Fremont, Calif.,on the edge of Silicon valley.
#It still houses a dingy, unused Toyota corolla assembly line on which an army of workers once turned out half a million cars annually.
Ultimately as many as 83 cars a day#roughly 20,000 are planned for the first year#will be produced at the factory.
Hyundai and Beijing Motors recently completed a mammoth factory outside Beijing that can produce a million vehicles a year using more robots
They watch over a four-story cage with different levels holding 168 rover#robots the size of go-carts.
Each rover is connected wirelessly to a central computer and on command will race along an aisle until it reaches its destination#a case of food to retrieve
Then a forklift operator summoned by the computer moves the cube to a truck for shipment.
assembly work that requires tactile feedback like placing fiberglass panels inside airplanes, boats or cars;
and unload its trucks. The workers can move one box every six seconds on average. But each box can weigh more than 130 pounds,
showing new ideas to students, reading on the bus, train or plane the list goes on and on.#
repairmen and delivery drivers#that offer little of Silicon valley s riches or glamour. Much of the debate about American unemployment has focused on why companies have moved factories overseas,
And we all got two tacos from a taco truck. That was our surprise. Two tacos.#
is sized a compact car device that sits on a irrigation canal s floor and utilizes the steady,
while today we hear the motor of an approaching car. Hearing also enables rapid communication between individuals and between animals.
And they installed electric streetcars lines in towns. All of these other gadgets gave us the light bulb.
Although the skintight shorts are being marketed to athletes and coaches, they could be useful for the deskbound.
One driver gets too close to another and has to brake, as does the driver behind,
as does the driver behind him#pretty soon, the first driver has sent a stop -and-go shock wave down the highway.
One driving-simulator study found that nearly half the time one vehicle passed another, the lead vehicle had a faster average speed.
All this leads to highway turbulence, which is why many traffic modelers see adaptive cruise control (A c. C.)#which automatically maintains a set distance behind a car and the vehicle in front of it#as the key to congestion relief.
Simulations have found that if some 20 percent of vehicles on a highway were equipped with advanced A c. C.,
and smoothing driver reactions. One study shows that even a highway that is running at peak capacity has only 4. 5 percent of its surface area occupied.
More sophisticated adaptive cruse control systems could presumably fit more cars on the road. When a quarter of the vehicles on a simulated highway had A c. C,
In another simulation, giving at least a quarter of the cars A c. C. cut traffic delays by up to 20 percent.
an estimated 6. 9 million cars each year will come with A c. C. 7. Anti-theft Handlebars Here s an old idea
The bearing system that allows the bike to turn can be locked so that a thief can t steer his stolen bike.
The lock is internal, meaning that he d have to destroy the bike to ride it away. 8. No more Greasy Chains An updated shaft drive
#which replaces the chain with a rod and internal gear system#would be perfect for urban riders.
Doctor On board Your car is already able to call for help when an accident occurs, but within a few years, it ll tip paramedics off to probable injuries too.
Researchers at the University of Michigan International Center for Automotive Medicine have created the predictive models by cross-referencing the crash data provided by sensors on cars, like speed and location of impact, with 3-D
The Rolling Arcade The industrial designer Jiang Qian has conceived of a subway strap that s also a video game.
while the train is in motion is part of the challenge. And unlike Angry Birds on your phone, Strap Game (that s the official name) will alert you
human cyclists were pitted against a computer-generated opponent moving at, supposedly, the exact speed the cyclist had achieved in an earlier time trial.
In fact, the avatars were moving 2 percent faster, and the human cyclists matched them, reaching new levels of speed.
Lying is obviously not a long-term strategy#once you realize what s going on, the effects may evaporate.
The Mind-reading Shopping cart In February, Chaotic Moon Labs began testing a robotic shopping cart that acts a bit like a mind-reading butler.
To start it up you can text message the cart s built-in tablet computer. Now it knows who you are and
what you need for dinner. The cart uses Microsoft s Kinect motion-sensor technology to track
and follow you through the store, pointing you#in a synthy voice reminiscent of A g. P. S. navigator#toward products on your list.
Still only a prototype, the cart isn t nearly as nimble as its human-powered cousin,
Items you add to the cart can be scanned automatically and you can finalize your purchase from the device,
If a company offered cheap wireless cameras that could be placed around a home, commercial property, on cars,
Noise from cars, machines and other forms of human activity could affect the growth of wild flowers,
#Dennis miller. VW s post climate change prototype vehicle...Have you ever felt you were in a farmers dreams?..
He said he s trying to do what many auto mechanics have done to make their engines run more efficiently:
portable fuel you could put in your car. We would aim to produce hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide,
#NASA issues call for new space taxis to fly to International Space station NASA hopes to be able to fly its astronauts on commercial carriers by about 2017.
and build space taxis to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space station. NASA plans to invest $300 million to $500 million in each of the firms selected under new 21-month partnership agreements, Ed Mango,
and there is no denying that garden-fresh veggies are preferable to ones that have spent the past several days in a truck or on a supermarket shelf.
These canola plants, found along most major trucking routes, look harmless. But they are fueling a controversy:
Unlike some laptops that schools roll into the classroom on carts and then roll back out again for the next class,
and invisible cars and windmills will all be possible. Ford had its Evos concept car on display at CES 2012 turning heads with style and design,
but little true innovation Transportation At CES, Ford motor Company unveiled its first-ever zero emissions, electric passenger vehicle, following in the footsteps of Tesla and Nissan.
And they jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon with the new Evos Concept Car. But behind the flashy surfaces
chrome wheels, and tech trimming lies some far bigger opportunities. 5.)Driverless cars The next revolution in transportation will be self-driving cars,
and the adoption of this technology will change virtually everything in the field of transportation and urban planning.
Google s self-driving car project has racked already up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways. 6.)Ground-Based Delivery Drones Before we have sold driverless passenger cars in any sizable quantities
Railroads and trucking companies should be worried as this will displace much of their industry. Parrot officially unveiled the follow-up to its popular quadrocopter at CES AR Drone 2. 0 Flying Drones
Automatic Pothole Detector/Reporter The connected city of the future will see cars automatically reporting
Powering electric cars, boats, and farm equipment may not be that far off. 19.)Plant Monitors-Urban agriculture is catching on like wildfire,
#At one point I even tried to convince my wife that the future wanted me to buy a new car,
complete strangers, sharing a cab. One guy took the tires and the radio; the other guy took the engine.#
complete strangers, sharing a cab. One guy took the tires and the radio; the other guy took the engine.#
2.)Top 10 Photos March 6, 2011 The inside-outside upside-downside car. The most fun you can have on four headrests
Long-time students head home from evening class in automated taxi pods, which can be called by mobile phone,
Henry ford s vision of the Sky Car is now here and the popular Aeromobil models can often be spotted over the capital,
Many commuters travel to finance jobs in Dubai and Karachi or to oversee manufacturing in Iraq
Audi, BMW, GM and Google tested them first. The search engine giant wanted them on the roads by 2020
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers predicted that autonomous cars would account for up to 75 percent of vehicles on the road by the year 2040.
I could see you sitting on the coach in my living room and you could see me sitting on your back porch,
(and bike paths and mountain views) unfairly reducing Boulder to a playground where smug eco-liberals puffed legalized marijuana
and write that everyone rides their bikes everywhere.##Out from the gleaming sunlight, a Lycra-clad cyclist whizzed majestically by.
Let me just say, it s hard to keep a straight face when touring this idyllic mountain cityand interviewing its start-up founders and venture capitalists, its coffee-shop denizens and microbrew cognoscenti.
I can ride my mountain bike to!#)#But I don t want to be unfair or stoop to caricature.
or any monolithic industry, Boulder County (population 300,000) ranks among the top 20 most productive metro areas in terms of GDP.
#Google s self-driving car. Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights,
signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids.
and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.
The driver in the lane to my right. He s twisted halfway around in his seat,
taking a picture of the Lexus that I m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski.
Both cars are heading south on Highway 880 in Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour,
He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so.
His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas,
and G. P. S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work.
Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes,
#oeself-Driving Car.##Every week for the past year and a half, Levandowski has taken the Lexus on the same slightly surreal commute.
He leaves his house in Berkeley at around eight o clock, waves goodbye to his fianc e and their son,
While other drivers are gawking at him he is observing them: recording their maneuvers in his car s sensor logs,
analyzing traffic flow, and flagging any problems for future review. The only tiresome part is
or an accident ahead and the Lexus insists that he take the wheel. A chime sounds, pleasant yet insistent, then a warning appears on his dashboard screen:#
as the Lexus took us across the Dumbarton Bridge.##oethis is more like Charles Lindbergh s plane.
As a commercial for the Dodge Charger put it two years ago, #oehands-free driving, cars that park themselves,
an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company? We ve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.#
#Levandowski understands the sentiment. He just has more faith in robots than most of us do.#
a self-driving car will save your life. The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction:
this year s model of last century s Make it belongs to the gleaming, chrome-plated age of jet packs
In 1939, at the World s Fair in New york, visitors stood in lines up to two miles long to see the General motors Futurama exhibit.
Its suburbs and skyscrapers were laced together by superhighways full of radio-guided cars.##oedoes it seem strange?
A sedan cruises down a highway, guided by circuits in the road, while a family plays dominoes inside.#
no driver fatigue.##From 1977: Engineers huddle around a driverless Ford on a test track.#
#oecars like this one may be on the nation s roads by the year 2000!##Levandowski shook his head.#
smart roads and smart cars. General motors pioneered the first approach in the late nineteen-fifties.
Its Firebird III concept car#haped like a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass-bubble cockpit#as designed to run on a test track embedded with an electrical cable,
like the slot on a toy speedway. As the car passed over the cable, a receiver in its front end picked up a radio signal
and followed it around the curve. Engineers at Berkeley later went a step further: they spiked the track with magnets,
alternating their polarity in binary patterns to send messages to the car#oeslow down, sharp curve ahead.#
#Smart cars were more flexible but also more complex. They needed sensors to guide them, computers to steer them,
In the nineteen-eighties, a German engineer named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van with video cameras and processors,
By 1995, Dickmanns s car was able to drive on the Autobahn from Munich to Odense,
Smart cars were just clever enough to get drivers into trouble. The highways and test tracks they navigated were controlled strictly environments.
is the founder of the Google Car project. A wunderkind from the west German city of Solingen, he programmed his first driving simulator at the age of twelve.
build a car that can drive a hundred and forty-two miles without human intervention. Ernst Dickmanns s car had gone similar distances on the Autobahn,
but always with a driver in the seat to take over in the tricky stretches. The cars in the Grand Challenge would be empty,
and the road would be rough: from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Instead of smooth curves and long straightaways, it had rocky climbs and hairpin turns;
instead of road signs and lane lines, G. P. S. waypoints.##oetoday, we could do it in a few hours,
and recalled that her son used to play with remote-control cars as a boy, crashing them into things on his bedroom floor.
He would build the world s first autonomous motorcycle. This seemed like a stroke of genius at the time.
The motorcycle could be like that, Levandowski thought: quicker off the mark than a car and more maneuverable.
It could slip through tighter barriers and drive just as fast. Also, it was a good way to get back at his mother,
who d never let him ride motorcycles as a kid.##oefine,#he thought.##oei ll just make one that rides itself.#
a motorcycle can t stand up on its own. It needs a rider to balance it#r else a complex,
the Carnegie mellon team was working with General motors, Caltech with Northrop grumman, Ohio State with Oshkosh trucking.
No motorcycle company was willing to put its name on the project. Then he added a hundred thousand dollars of his own.
#oeshe hated the motorcycle project.##There came a day when Goldberg realized that half his Ph d. students had been working for Levandowski.
They d begun with a Yamaha dirt bike, made for a child, and stripped it down to its skeleton.
#bike takes off, engineers jump up and down, bike falls over#ore than six hundred times in a row.#
#oewe built the bike and rebuilt the bike, just sort of groping in the dark, #Smart told me.#
#oeit s like one of my colleagues once said:##You don t understand, Charlie, this is robotics.
Nothing actually works.##Finally, a year into the project, a Russian engineer named Alex Krasnov cracked the code.
When the bike tipped to one side, Krasnov had it steer ever so slightly in the same direction.
This created centrifugal acceleration that pulled the bike upright again. By doing this over and over, tracing tiny S-curves as it went,
the motorcycle could hold to a straight line. On the video clip from that day, the bike wobbles a little at first,
like a baby giraffe finding its legs, then suddenly, confidently circles the field#s if guided by an invisible hand.
Caltech s Chevy Tahoe crashed into a fence. Even the winner, Carnegie mellon, earned at best a Pyrrhic victory.
As for the Ghost rider, it managed to beat out more than ninety cars in the qualifying round#mile
the bike sputtered forward, rolled three feet, and fell over.##oethat was a dark day,
he let his car teach itself. Pomerleau equipped the computer in his minivan with artificial neural networks,
modelled on those in the brain. As he drove around Pittsburgh, they kept track of his driving decisions,
the car was going about two to four miles an hour along a path through a park#ou could ride a tricycle faster,
#In 1996, the car steered itself from Washington, D c, . to San diego with only minimal intervention#early four times as far as Ernst Dickmanns s cars had gone a year earlier.#
#oeno Hands Across America,#Pomerleau called it. Machine learning is an idea nearly as old as computer science#lan Turing, one of the fathers of the field, considered it the essence of artificial intelligence.
A self-taught car can come to some strange conclusions. It may confuse the shadow of a tree for the edge of the road,
It s like a baby in a stroller deducing the world from the faces and storefronts that flicker by.
sandy trails that the cars tended to go crazy.##oeput too much intelligence into a car and it becomes creative,
#Sebastian Thrun told me. The second Grand Challenge put these two approaches to the test.
Stanford with its puny Volkswagen Touareg, nicknamed Stanley. It was an even match. Both teams used similar sensors and software,
Rather than program the car with models of the rocks and bushes it should avoid,
The lasers on the roof scanned the area around the car, while the camera looked farther ahead.
Carnegie mellon, with two cars to Stanford s one, decided to play it safe. They had Highlander run at a fast clip#ore than twenty miles an hour on average#hile Sandstorm hung back a little.
Five cars finished the hundred-and-thirty-two-mile course; more than twenty cars went farther than the winner had in 2004.
In one year, they d made more progress than darpa s contractors had in twenty.#
I have a car, I have a computer, and I need a million bucks. So they were doing things in their home shops,
built a self-driving#oedoom Buggy#that, Thrun recalls, could change lanes and stop at stop signs.
A Ford S. U. V. programmed by some insurance-company employees from Louisiana finished just thirty-seven minutes behind Stanley.
His motorcycle embodied that evolution. Although it never made it out of the semifinals of the second race#ripped up by some wooden boards#he Ghost rider had become, in its way,
Two years later, the Smithsonian added the motorcycle to its collection; a year after that, it added Stanley as well.
and a row of what look like clown bicycles parked out front, free for the taking. When you walk in,
and walk through parking lots and past multilane roads, the transportation infrastructure dominates, #Brin said.##oeit s a huge tax on the land.#
#Most cars are used only for an hour or two a day, he said. The rest of the time, they re parked on the street or in driveways and garages.
But if cars could drive themselves, there would be need no for most people to own them.
and dropping them off independently, waiting at parking lots between calls. They d be cheaper and more efficient than taxis#y some calculations,
they d use half the fuel and a fifth the road space of ordinary cars#nd far more flexible than buses or subways.
Streets would clear highways shrink, parking lots turn to parkland.##oewe re not trying to fit into an existing business model,
#Brin said.##oewe are just on such a different planet.##When Thrun and Levandowski first came to Google, in 2007,
Five years earlier, Page had strapped a video camera on his car and taken several hours of footage around the Bay Area.
Google engineers went on to jury-rig some vans with G. P. S . and rooftop cameras that could shoot in every direction.
Then they equipped a hundred cars and sent them all over the United states. Google street view has since spread to more than a hundred countries.
to train more than two thousand data processors to create new maps and fix old ones. When Apple s new mapping software failed so spectacularly a year ago,
Would he be interested in building a self-driving pizza delivery car? Within five weeks, he and a team of fellow Berkeley graduates and other engineers had re
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