History of PATH in IEEE

For those with access to IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems online, PATH researcher Steven Shladover has written a 20 year retrospective of the organization. The abstract reads thusly:

The California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) Program was founded in 1986, as the first research program in North America focused on the subject now known as intelligent transportation systems (ITS). This paper reviews the history of the founding of PATH and of the national ITS program in the U.S., providing perspective on the changes that have occurred during the past 20 years.

Schladover explains well the significance of 20 years for the booming ITS field and some of the generational shifts that have occurred since its inception.

UPS Logistics

A post not wholly irrelevant to the holidays- NYTimes is currently reporting on logistics software being implemented by UPS. One major factor, the article explains, is the near-elimination of those costly, wasteful left-hand turn signals. The author explains:

Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons. So what can Brown do for you? We can’t speak to how good or bad they are in the parcel-delivery world, but they won’t be clogging up the left-hand lane while they do their business.

TSA Trouble!

USA Today is today reporting on a recent report from the TSA describing the state of the United States' airport screening. There are good omens for advocates of privatization:

At Chicago O'Hare International Airport, screeners missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were packed in everyday carry-ons — including toiletry kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70 tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San Francisco.

Maybe this will excite ol' Kip into the voyeuristic project hinted at a week earlier in the same newspaper.

I'm From the Future

An article today from the Washington Post describes a new infrared system for applications in High Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes. It explains that

The lanes are billed as the salvation of the suffering commuter. Solo drivers will be able to buy their way around congestion, while carpoolers will ride free. But the lanes' success hinges on finding a way to differentiate between paying and nonpaying customers without stopping every vehicle to count heads.

The system automagically detects the number of passengers in passing vehicles by bouncing infrared waves off of their skin. This marks a departure from computer vision-based approaches for detection in similar circumstances (for example, automated pedestrian detection).

A 'Brave New World' of Telecommuting

TheRecord.com has a story on a Halifax, Nova Scotia man who uses an automaton as a proxy at his office in Waterloo.

The man's coworkers have adjusted well to their new robotic overlord.

First A380 Tickets Up for Auction

Seats on the first flight of an Airbus A380 will be auctioned off starting today on Ebay. The flight will be from Singapore to Sydney on October 25 and tickets are expected to fetch upwards of $2,550.00. Every seat on the Singapore Airlines A380s will be equipped with a PC running Redhat Linux -- and those PCs in first class will come with a 23" monitor.

Cryptanalysts Gone Wild!!!

Here is a cryptanalysis paper on some deficiencies with the KeeLoq cipher program that may be used for your little key clicker thing if you own a Chrysler, Daewoo, Fiat, General Motors, Honda, Toyota, Volvo, Volkswagen, or Jaguar vehicle.

I know it's not quite as titillating as encryption for inter-vehicular ad hoc wireless networks like in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), but I'm only human.

From CNet:

Japanese revved up for car software standard

Toyota, Nissan and Honda planning to develop a standard operating system for automobiles.

July 25, 2007
New York Cabbies May Strike Over GPS Tracking

informationweek.com

Does your car have a Black Box?

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced yesterday that "automakers must inform customers if their vehciles are equipped with an Event Data Recorder (EDR)."

The new federal rule, which takes effect starting with model year 2011 cars, will require automakers who have chosen to install EDRs to note in the owner’s manual that the safety monitoring equipment has been installed.

The rule also includes new requirements designed to ensure that the data collected by EDRs can be used to improve highway safety. For example, the rule requires EDRs to be more durable to protect data during a crash. The rule also requires automakers to collect the same type of crash data if they chose to install an EDR (see attached list for all data elements).

A pdf of the full notice can be found here.

via /.

NHTSA's Multitaskers of Horror!

Last month news agencies reported about NHTSA's report about distracted drivers. The report, entitled The Impact of Driver Inattention On Near-Crash/Crash Risk tracked 100 vehicles equipped with video and sensor devices for one year.
A brief analysis of the study shows:

• Drowsiness is a significant problem that increases a driverÂ’s risk of a crash or near-crash by at least a factor of four. But drowsy driving may be significantly under-reported in police crash investigations.
  
• The most common distraction for drivers is the use of cell phones. However, the number of crashes and near-crashes attributable to dialing is nearly identical to the number associated with talking or listening. Dialing is more dangerous but occurs less often than talking or listening.
  
• Reaching for a moving object increased the risk of a crash or near-crash by 9 times; looking at an external object by 3.7 times; reading by 3 times; applying makeup by 3 times; dialing a hand-held device (typically a cell phone) by almost 3 times; and talking or listening on a hand-held device by 1.3 times.
  
• Drivers who engage frequently in distracting activities are more likely to be involved in an inattention-related crash or near-crash. However, drivers are often unable to predict when it is safe to look away from the road to multi-task because the situation can change abruptly leaving the driver no time to react even when looking away from the forward roadway for only a brief time.

An Electric Car that's Faster than a Ferrari?

CNN Money reports that a new electric car has one of the fastest 0-60 mph acceleration speed in the world, second only to the 1001 horsepowerd Bugatti Veyron.
The X1 designed by Ian Wright. Could a high performance car be the key to bringing electric vehicles to the mass market?

At least it's more effecient than the jet-propelled VW bug.

via /.

Toronto's GO Transit Hacked

Tronto's GO Transit (Greater Toronto Transit Authority) was hacked. From Computerworld:

“It was Thursday evening, April 27, about 5:30, and I was leaving Toronto and I was taking the GO Transit train,” said [Stephen] Nicholls, vice president of the National Citizens Coalition. “Each car has a little electronic advertising sign and messages scroll across them and usually it’s something like buy tickets to this event or messages about train safety. But this time the message on the sign was reading ‘Stephen Harper eats babies,’ every three seconds. Stephen Harper used to be my boss and he’s president of the organization I work for right now.”

Nicholls, who lives in a suburb of Toronto, thought the message on the sign was strange and figured it had to be some kind of parody, with some kind of kicker explaining what it meant. But there was no punchline, he said.

“My first thought was maybe I’m hallucinating and that this couldn’t be. So I sent an e-mail to the GO Transit people and I put it on my blog. I never got any messages back from the GO Transit people over the next couple days,” he said. “But people in the blogging community picked it up, and it sort of got all over the place and local media picked it up. Then I talked about it on a radio station and suddenly the GO Transit people were contacting me. They explained that a hacker got into the system and changed the message. Apparently, this person did it with a wireless device [that] costs about $25 ... at any hardware store or any tech store.... They don’t know who it was and apparently it was running all last weekend on different trains.”

The LED signs are programmed with an infrared remote, and apparently weren't password protected all the time. The signs will most likely be protected now though.

Stephen Harper doesn't eat babies.

FAA saves by switching to Linux

The Federal Aviation Administration and Red Hat issued a press release this week announcing that the FAA saved $15 Million by migrating its systems to Linux. The move made the systems' operation 30% more efficient than the previous system with 50% of the operating costs.

Could more public agencies move to open source systems?

via /.

A Website solves South African logistical crisis

Logistics costs in South Afric represent 14.7% of the country's GDP, compared to 8.5% in the United States. South Africa's State of Logistics Survey investigated the issues facing logistics and freight in South Africa and offered some solutions. Without waiting for an official governement response, new website, Bid2Load.com offers dynamic real-time solutions for companies looking to transport goods around the country.