#Google s quest to popularize self-driving cars How a self-driving car sees the world.
At about 8am every morning, Anthony Levandowski gets into the driver s seat of his white Lexus for his daily commute to work.
And with that, Levandowski has handed off control of his vehicle to software named Google Chauffeur. He takes his feet off the pedals and puts his hands in his lap.
The car s computer is now driving him to work. Self-driving cars have been around in one form or another since the 1970s
It s not just Google that s developing the technology, but also most of the major car manufacturers:
Following Google policy, Levandowski drives through residential roads and surface streets himself, while Chauffeur drives the freeways.
#Levandowski works at Google s headquarters in Mountain view, California. He s the business lead of Google s self-driving-car project, an initiative that the company has been developing for the better part of a decade.
Google has a small fleet of driverless cars now plying public roads. They are test vehicles,
but they are also simply doing their job: ferrying Google employees back and forth from work. Commuters in Silicon valley report seeing one of the cars#asily identifiable by a spinning turret mounted on the roof#n average of once an hour.
Google itself reports that collectively the cars have driven more than 500,000 miles without crashing. At a ceremony at Google headquarters last year, where Governor Jerry brown signed California s self-driving-car bill into law, Google cofounder Sergey Brin said#oeyou
can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this.##In other words, a self-driving car will be parked on a street near you by 2018.
Yet releasing a car will require more than a website and a#oeclick here to download#button.
For Chauffeur to make it to your driveway, it will have to run a gauntlet: Chauffeur must navigate a path through a skeptical Detroit, a litigious society,
In the language particular to Google, the researchers are#oedogfooding#the car#riving to work each morning in the same way that Levandowski does.
Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience.
#oewe have a saying here at Google, #says Levandowski.##oein God we trust#ll others must bring data.#
The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second. Glitches occur about every 300 miles.
Chris Urmson, the director of Google s self-driving-car project, told a government audience in Washington, D c,
Google s crew of young testers have been trained in extreme driving techniques#ncluding emergency braking, high-speed lane changes,
to put down that coffee or phone, and refocus.##oeit could be 20 seconds; it could be 10 seconds,
There has been reported only one accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google. A self-driving car near Google s headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward
and impact another two cars, falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago#he Stone age,
in the foreshortened timelines of software development#nd, according to Google spokespeople, the car was not in self-driving mode at the time,
Considering that the Google self-driving program has clocked already half a million miles, the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.
It s not an argument Google makes to the public because Levandowski says the system hasn encountered t enough challenging situations in its real-world commutes.#
#oewe can speculate; we have models, but we don t actually know the value of the technology to society,
#Google has been uncommonly secretive about its self-driving-car program. Though it began in 2009,
the company first announced the project in a blog post a year later. Detroit was amused not.
#Google is still not saying much to reporters (including this one) about its plans, but since it was accused of being the bad guy in a real-life Matrix,
Google lobbyists have made the rounds with legislators in Washington. Its engineers have made pilgrimages to Detroit and abroad.
Google wants to make#oeavailable to the rest of the auto industry all of the building blocks that we ourselves use,
#he said and then ticked off the goodies#oethe Android operating system, search, voice, social, maps, navigation, even Chauffeur.#
#Instead of rebuilding a whole operating system from scratch, he said, automakers should focus on making the user experience their own.
if Google is proposing to give away the software. For the car companies, the real cost of implementing the technology would be specialized in the peripheral that Chauffeur needs to run:
but represents a point in space instead of on a two-dimensional screen.)Group a million or so voxels together
But at $75, 000 to $85, 000 each, Google s lidar costs more than every other component in the self-driving car combined, including the car itself.
A grizzled maverick of an engineer named David Hall designed the lidar that Google uses.
Industry scuttlebutt has it that Ford is giving Google the most serious consideration. Hall confirms that a major automaker recently summoned him to its headquarters to ask
Google, to its credit, shows no signs that it s allowing Detroit to slow it down.
Google is not a car manufacturer. Nor does it intend to be one, Levandowski says. So what s the plan?#
#In other words, Google thinks a new generation of bot-rodders may kick things off. Google won t say anything more,
but since there s really only one place to turn for the all-important lidar, I ask David Hall
and the super-high-resolution Google maps that go with it, Hall doesn t see the point. He imagines talking to potential customers.#
#oe#Almost as good as Google s?##The other fight is the legal one. It too is filled with catch-22 s. Hall described a Powerpoint presentation containing the automaker s analysis of self-driving-car technology.#
The Google car doesn t work without one, as Chauffeur needs to be able to hand back the reins with 10,20,
#Computers don t have hands. That is a problem. Some states, prodded by Google lobbyists and looking to get ahead of the curve,
have made the cars explicitly legal. The doctrine assigns driver-hood to the person either in the driver s seat or the one who activates the self-driving function.
the director of Google s self-driving-car project, allows. But that doesn t mean the development of potentially lifesaving technology should be halted.#
Computer control enables cars to drive behind one another, so they travel as a virtual unit.
It uses technology that s already built into every high-end Volvo sold today, plus a communications system.
autonomous-software agents negotiating the travel route with other agents on a moment-to-moment basis
in order to optimize the entire network.##In our self-driving future, not only would traffic jams become a thing of the past,
Wayne Gerdes, the father of#oehypermiling,#can nearly double the rated efficiency of cars using fuel-sipping techniques that could be incorporated into auto-driving software.
Level three has the Google-style autopilot. And level four is the holy grail#he car that can drive you home
Both use a combination of radar and computer vision to center the vehicle in the lane
who worked with Google on its self-driving-car project for two years.##oepeople start doing all kinds of things they shouldn t#igging around in the backseat, for example.
#Google is betting that established car manufacturers, working with low-cost radar and camera components, will never adequately bridge that gap.
NHTSA s former deputy director, Ron Medford, has signed just on as Google s director of safety for the self-driving-car project.#
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#E-cigarette use doubles among middle and high school students More than 1. 78 million middle and high school students nationwide had tried e-cigarettes in 2012.
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#Tapping into the Waterways in the Sky Futurist Thomas Frey: With all of the water we have in the world,
and other forms of passive energy, our future water networks will be operate with far more efficiency and convenience than anything imaginable today.
A turbine intake drives air underground through a network of piping that rapidly cools the air to the temperature of the soil where it reaches 100%humidity
and our elaborate network of fire hydrants throughout every community? To me, the handwriting is on the wall.
By Futurist Thomas Frey Author of#oecommunicating with the Future#the book that changes everything Via Futuristspeaker. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati e
According to Bodner s website, the company spent 2012#oequietly designing a prototype to be installed on board a naval submarine#
I imagine a sunscreen tablet might be developed in five years or so. Nothing like it exists at the moment.#
#7. Paper-thin flexible computers and phones In early 2013, consumer electronics shows debuted a prototype by European firm Plastic Logic of a product called the Papertab.
a fully functional, touch screen tablet computer that is not only as thin as a sheet of paper, but as flexible as one too,
#The machine is the size of a regular smartphone, with a 9. 4-centimeter (3. 7 in) display,
Users can give the phone commands by using#oebend gestures.##It consumes no power when not in use and is considerably harder to damage than an ordinary phone. 6. Tooth Regeneration Regeneration of body parts in humans seems permanently consigned to the realm of science fiction,
even though many species of animals are able to completely regrow lost parts. It s long been known that alligators are lost able toregrow teeth, for example,
won t have screens so much as they ll have a viewing area. As seen above, it could be a desktop display,
displayed by a unit the size of a toaster. 4. Real-time Google earth At RAL Space in Oxford,
scientists are building two video cameras quite unlike any other. Meter-long tubes packed with electronics and mirrors,
and use it to layer complex animations on top of Google earth, sometimes piecing together multiple camera angles to extrapolate the desired information.
and weather conditions soon. 3. Wireless Electricity The notion of wireless electric power has been around far longer than one might think:
It will use a donut-shaped magnetic field to contain gases that will reach temperatures comparable to those at the core of the sun, in excess of 150 million degrees C (270 million F),
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#Who needs Hyperloop? ET3 will be global space travel On earth Daryl Oster, CEO for Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies.
#oeobviously I have to focus on core Tesla business and Spacex business, and that s more than enough,#Musk told reporters on an Aug 7 Tesla Motors conference call.#
Oster promotes a planetary network capable of speeding a passenger from New york to Beijing in two hours.#
working nights at an Air force Exchange Service Burger king as he built his book. In the late 1980s, there was a spontaneous move to Lincoln,
Among other uses, the system could transport oil more cheaply than through pipelines, he said.
life-support and sanity-preserving systems (such as big video screens to distract its passengers from the fact that they re hurtling through the choking darkness),
With respect to ET3, Texas A&m Transportation Institute spokesman Rick Davenport said in an email, #oethis is the first
says that simulating windows with high-def screens would#oehelp a lot, #but claustrophobia will be a real problem for some passengers.
Oster told Musk he was working on securing a site for a three-mile $20 million ET3 test bed and hoped to break ground before the end of 2013.
The Internet. But right now we don t have any of that excitement going on, #he said.#
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#Agriculture the New Game of Drones Futurist Thomas Frey: A few days ago the people in Deer trail, Colorado made national news with a proposed ballot initiative to allow hunting licenses to shoot down flying drones.
The automation of farming has led to fewer people tending massive estates, with many growing to tens of thousands of acres.
and CO2 sensing Trait assessment for breeding Wireless data collection from ground sensors Plant status tracking Crop status (growing stage, yield estimates, etc.)
illumination sciences, photonics, optoelectronics, photoreceptors, spatial imaging, lens mounting hardware, and much more. Here are a few of the cutting edge companies entering this field:
Using fully photogrammetric software, these drones can create high-resolution Orthomosaic reconstructions from aerial imagery. 16 megapixel camera
the ipad flight app, camera, charging station, high performance batteries, Wi-fi extender, and a tracking system.
The UAV is controlled manually by using an ipad. DMZ provides flight training, guidance on effective scouting and technical support.
Image identification software will give farmers precise location of weeds that require suppression. 8.)RMAX by Yamaha (rmax. yamaha-motor. com. au) Yamaha s development of utility
farmers will invest heavily in automation to meet whatever unique foods consumers are demanding. Over time, flying swarmbots will replace the ground-based drones,
By Futurist Thomas Frey Author of#oecommunicating with the Future##the book that changes everything Via Futuristspeaker. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati swfobject. embedswf (http://www. youtube
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#Salt for Life incredibly realistic salt replacement Salt for Life will begin rolling out online and in grocery stores in August and September of this year.
That s the equivalent of 1. 8 billion ipads. The ship is a link in a long, complicated,
Just as your email is disassembled into discrete bundles of data the minute you hit send, then reassembled in your recipient s inbox later, the uniform,
and routed by sophisticated computer systems that determine their arrangement on board and plot the most efficient route to get them from point to point.
more than 90 percent of the rest#verything from clothes to cars to computers#ow travels inside shipping containers.#
In the U s.,two adjacent ports#os Angeles and Long beach#andle nearly half of the nation s container traffic.
#oeit s all done by software, #says Karl Olaf Petters, a spokesman for Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA), the company that runs Altenwerder and most of Hamburg s other cargo terminals.
Beginning last year,#oedual-cycle#algorithms help Altenwerder s cranes and AGVS load and unload ships simultaneously,
and harbors have given way to engineers and computer specialists; HHLA employs more than 100 people in its IT department.
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#Top 10 Photos of the Week Excellent misuse of cooking utensils! Quote of the Day#oewhere lipstick is concerned,
And in the 21 months since its publication, the work has been cited in 42 other papers, according to Web of Knowledge.
less than 40 percent of studies reporting microrna sequencing data submitted that data to public databases.
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#35 of the most shocking science facts that are totally wrong Lightning does strike twice.
For the list we used Wikipedia s great list of#oecommon Misconceptions#and this great reddit. com thread,
Wikipedia)( The Flat Earth Society. 28.)) Sharks can and do get cancer. The myth that they don t was created by I. William Lane to sell shark cartilage as a cancer treatment.
or an employee sitting in a cramped cubicle typing away at his computer, with a light bulb that is turned off.
that they move around the office as they speak on the phone, or that they sit on exercise balls
and bounce up and down as they read their e-mails. Source). ) In addition, Dr. Medina explains that in 18 studies of older adults,
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#Growupbox: A shipping container farm that grows tilapia and salad greens Growup s Kickstarter-funded aquaponic farm is a circular ecosystem with 150 fish, all self-contained in a box.
#Second life officially turns 10 years old Second life provides startups with a few hard but valuable lessons on the realities of creating products and building audiences.
The once-trendy virtual world Second life officially turns 10 years old this week. It s been years since its initial hype wave.
Many technorati thought it would be as important to the internet as Facebook itself and many may even be surprised that SL still exists.
I ve been writing about Second life since 2003, first as Linden Lab s#oeembedded journalist,#then as a Gigaom editor and for a book,
and still continue covering iton my own blog. Still, I recognize that it s very much a niche product that today isn t adding users.
because there s a good chance Second life will finally have, well, a second life. As real-world social networks like Facebook reach a usage plateau
but first some key takeaways from Second life s first 10 years: Your product is whatever consumers say it is Early in its development,
Its potential was to become the 3d web (a la the Metaverse of Neal Stephenson s#oesnow Crash#oe.
Innovation must account for usability Years before social media became integral to the internet, Linden Lab envisioned an entire ecosystem of user-generated content.
from a game developer with no Metaverse-making pretensions. There s little point in creating an innovative product
when Second life had about 550,000 active users. And without new users spending Linden Dollars, landowners can t afford to keep paying monthly land tier fees
there are several reasons why Second life s prospects in the next 10 years are still quite good.
Indeed, some academics believe using Second life might even help improve motor ability for people with Parkinson s.)
web-based 3d virtual world seemingly designed to specifically avoid all of Linden Lab s early mistakes and pitfalls.
This move echoes a prediction made by original Second life investor Mitch Kapor, who insisted to me back in 2009 after SL s major hype had cooled that it would still become a mass-market product.#
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#Sahara Forest Project multi-technology synergy to grow food in the desert Revegetation and creation of green jobs through profitable production of food, freshwater, biofuels and electricity.
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#Proposal to Eliminate Forest fires Completely Futurist Thomas Frey: Over the past few days I ve been listening to news reports about the devastating fires burning in Colorado.
I was an engineer working as part of an IBM team to build a mobile satellite command and control center for monitoring missile launches from space.
and monitoring pipelines. However, this same technology can be modified to work on flying drones to monitor fire activity on forestlands.
By Futurist Thomas Frey Author of#oecommunicating with the Future#-the book that changes everything Via Futuristspeaker. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati i
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#Future cities will have buildings that can think and breathe Masdar City will use solar energy and other renewables,
Instead of clear skies and open air, our atmosphere could be filled with lacy meshwork that filters air
An expanded range of screens and canopies built with minutely balanced filtering layers could work with convective air
Terreform s plans for a vast site covering Brooklyn s Navy yard shows a densely interwoven fertile fabric of elevated walkways,
and lightweight manufactured screens, all manicured like a fantastic topiary. My own work on Near-Living Architecture group at Waterloo,
Canada, has integrated densely massed microprocessor-controlled filters containing protocells within suspended canopy and wall surfaces.
a floating canopy of laser-cut aluminum meshwork is fitted with dense masses of interconnected glass and polymer filters.
who described the world as coming from an inner core of pure geometric forms. However, there are good reasons to pursue the opposite of these kinds of stripped forms.
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#Insect-eating is the future of food Insects may be the food of the future. In Western societies, eating insects is considered disgusting or even primitive.
A quick Google search tells us that caterpillars have a nutty (to be more specific enoki-pine nutty)
Here s an excerpt from Kyle Hill s blog post about this at Scientific American:#
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#The Untold Story of Africa s Farming Boom Tens of thousands are returning home with money
these#oeperi-urban#farmers PDF typically bring their goods to market by taxi or motorcycle, striking deals in advance by text message.
Information technology is boosting farmers profits Go to any African market in even the tiniest village and you ll see farmers busily text messaging on their cellphones.
By linking buyers and sellers, and making it easier to disseminate important information like market prices
information technology is greatly enhancing farmer productivity and allowing coordination at an unprecedented scale. Food brokers, for instance, can aggregate the efforts of small holders quickly and inexpensively;
what s more, much of the software they use to do that is designed by and for African programmers.
Thanks to text messages and the mobile Internet, it can now collect produce from the field,
In the mid-2000s, Uganda s largest cooking oil company, the Mukwano Group, rapidly enlisted 100 000 small farmers to grow sunflower seeds by using text messaging
and mobile-phone#oetrees#to explain everything from when to plant and weed to where and when to deliver the harvested crops.
One project, working through partner radio stations in Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Mali, and Malawi, has reached an estimated 40 million listeners. 6. African farms use the least amount of modern technology in the world,
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#Probiotics found in yogurt affects brain function Women who regularly consumed probiotics through yogurt showed altered brain function.
Further, in response to the task, these women had a decrease in the engagement of a widespread network in the brain that includes emotion-,cognition-and sensory-related areas.
The women in the other two groups showed a stable or increased activity in this network.
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#Bill gates talks to scientists about toilets Bill gates speaking at the National Academy of Sciences. Bill and Melinda Gates spoke at the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit group that has advised the nation on important scientific matters for 150 years.
Scientific advances like the microprocessor and new medicines have been key in lifting millions of people around the world out of poverty.
and computer-controlled irrigation covering thousands of acres that conserve millions of gallons of water each day.#
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#Apple unveils top iphone and ipad apps of all time Apple s App store launched nearly five years ago
and they are counting down to the 50 billionth downloaded app. In celebration, the company will reward the person who downloads that app with a $10, 000 App store gift card.
In line with this, Apple also revealed its updated lists of all-time top iphone and ipad apps.
Without further ado, here are the new charts listing the most-downloaded paid and free iphone and ipad apps of all time#that is, until the App store hits another milestone.
The Top 25 All-time Paid iphone Apps Angry Birds Fruit Ninja Doodle Jump cut the Rope Angry Birds Seasons Whatsapp Messenger Camera+Words With Friends
Tiny Wings Angry Birds Space Pocket God Plants vs. Zombies The Game of Life Classic Edition The Moron Test Where s My Water?
Draw Something Monopoly Angry Birds Star wars Motionx GPS Drive Skee-Ball Scrabble UNO Minecraft Pocket Edition Color Splash The Sims 3
The Top 25 All-time Free iphone Apps Facebook Pandora Radio Instagram Youtube Skype Words With Friends Free The Weather Channel Twitter Temple Run Google search
Netflix Shazam Angry Birds Free Draw Something Free Flashlight? Facebook Messenger Google earth Fruit Ninja Free iheartradio Movies by Flixster, with Rotten Tomatoes Bump ebay PAC-MAN Lite Groupon Google maps The Top 25
All-time Paid ipad Apps Pages Angry Birds HD Angry Birds Seasons HD Where s My Water?
Fruit Ninja HD Angry Birds Space HD Garageband Words With Friends HD Cut the Rope HD Keynote Numbers Angry Birds Star wars HD
Goodreader for ipad Scrabble HD for ipad Minecraft Pocket Edition Plants vs. Zombies HD Notability Monopoly for ipad Quickoffice Pro HD Star Walk HD Draw Something imovie iphoto Where s My Perry?
Bad Piggies HD The Top 25 All-time Free ipad Apps Skype for ipad The Weather Channel for ipad Netflix Angry Birds HD Free Kindle Facebook Pandora
Radio Calculator for ipad Free Fruit Ninja HD Free Words With Friends HD Free Google earth ABC Player Calculator Pro for ipad Free Temple
Run Youtube ebay for ipad CNN App for ipad Dropbox Adobe Reader Twitter Solitaire NYTIMES for ipad Temple Run 2 Hulu Plus Draw
Something Free Are your own favorite apps included in App store s all-time favorites? Photo credit: Slash Gear Via Mashable Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati c
#13%of calories consumed by Americans comes from added sugars Men consumed more sugar per day (an average of 335 calories) than women (239.
Sugar. Honey. Maple syrup. Molasses. High fructose corn syrup. These are all#oeadded sugars, #that you are probably eating
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