Science & Technology News

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

In the link to the NYT that I previously posted, there's mention of the sort of money that many big players, including most major auto makers, are betting on self-driving cars. They wouldn't mislead us, would they?

As I mentioned, I haven't yet seen what seems to be a cohesive plan from a city for the adoption of self-driving cars. or discussion of same. I have seen some past articles and comments from early zealots who had the idea that self-driving cars would solve all their urban transportation and gridlock issues without requiring much in the way of mods and infrastructure changes. A city budget office's wet dream.

I'd truly be grateful if you'd link some examples of the urban planning that you're aware of, that will realize the promise of self-driving cars that you are confident about.

https://iot.eetimes.com/the-4-cities...mous-vehicles/

Google is your friend

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by newhaul

https://iot.eetimes.com/the-4-cities...mous-vehicles/

Google is your friend

None of those have to do with modifying the city itself. They're just trials of 4 different self-driving vehicles. Ok, maybe there will be alterations in the Toyota Japan example, but no details are given.

It is indicative of some of the hype I was mentioning, where the expectation is more vehicle than city.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

None of those have to do with modifying the city itself. They're just trials of 4 different self-driving vehicles. Ok, maybe there will be alterations in the Toyota Japan example, but no details are given.

It is indicative of some of the hype I was mentioning, where the expectation is more vehicle than city.

It is a start

[Lake-Effect]

Some insight into what has contributed to the Texas power shortage:

Alberta and Texas share many similarities in their power grids.


Both are historically based around fossil fuel generation, with recently growing shares of wind and solar. Both have limited electrical connections to their neighbours, leaving it largely up to themselves to manage their reliability. And both operate, uniquely in North America, under what is called an "energy-only" market — paying competitive generators solely for the energy they produce.
...
While the rest of the continent adds a layer of capacity payments to ensure sufficient power generating capability to keep the lights on, or relies on a traditional, regulated system of utilities (over-)building to meet their customers needs, Alberta and Texas put their faith in the market, letting wholesale power prices rise to what may seem at times astronomical levels.

The idea is, by letting prices rise, demand will fall in the short term and new investment in generation will be attracted to the market in the long term, by producers keen to cash in on these rare but profitable scarcity events.

tl;dr:

• system was not designed for cold temperatures,
• favouring low prices over resilience,
• limited ability to import electricity

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by newhaul

With my family it's more often than you would think .
One of my cousins is an author you likely know Larry Mcmurtry he writes westerns his most well known is likely the lonesome dove series.

I can see how writing Westerns would give him the knowledge and experience to authoritatively describe the details of modern wind turbine generators.

That was more sarcasm than I as a moderator should have publicly expressed. Couldn't help myself. Sorry Newhaul.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Adelie

Self-driving cars will not increase the thru-put of roads by 10x, and certainly not by more.
They might increase it by 3x but even that would be pushing it and then only on highways . ..

A fleet of driverless cars, working together to keep traffic moving smoothly, can improve overall traffic flow by at least 35 percent, researchers have shown. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed a small fleet of miniature robotic cars to drive on a multi-lane track, and observed how the traffic flow changed when one of the cars stopped.
If different automotive manufacturers are all developing their own autonomous cars with their own software, those cars all need to communicate with each other effectively.
They tested the fleet in ‘egocentric’ and ‘cooperative’ driving modes, using both normal and aggressive driving behaviours, and observed how the fleet reacted to a stopped car. In the normal mode, cooperative driving improved traffic flow by 35% over egocentric driving, while for aggressive driving, the improvement was 45%. The researchers then tested how the fleet reacted to a single car controlled by a human via a joystick.


“A Fleet of Miniature Cars for Experiments in Cooperative Driving” ~ by Nicholas Hyldmar, Yijun He, Amanda Prorok
➥ https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.06133.pdf


“Will Automated Vehicles Negatively Impact Traffic Flow?” ~ by S. C. Calvert, W. J. Schakel, and J. W. C. van Lint
“... A long gradual transition will occur from manual driving to automated driving, in which many yet unknown traffic flow dynamics will be present. These effects have the potential to increasingly aid or cripple current road networks. In this contribution, we investigate these effects using an empirically calibrated and validated simulation experiment, backed up with findings from literature. We found that low-level automated vehicles in mixed traffic will initially have a small negative effect on traffic flow and road capacities. The experiment further showed that any improvement in traffic flow will only be seen at penetration rates above 70%. Also, the capacity drop appeared to be slightly higher with the presence of low-level automated vehicles...”
➥ https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jat/2017/3082781/


Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control (usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle) will never exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that “autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain; and that may never change.

➥ https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-g...ll-conditions/

Waymo CEO Says Self-Driving Cars Won't Be Ubiquitious for Decades
➥ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ource=inshorts

[GordMay]

NASA's Perseverance rover set to land on Mars, at 3:55 p.m. ET today
If successful, the American rover will join two other spacecraft, that recently entered Mars's orbit: the Amal space probe from the United Arab Emirates and China's Tianwen-1 rover and orbiter duo.

The landing site, Jezero, is a basin where scientists believe an ancient river flowed into a lake and deposited sediments in a fan shape known as a delta. Scientists think the environment here was likely to have preserved signs of any life that gained a foothold billions of years ago – but Jezero also has steep cliffs, sand dunes, and boulder fields. Landing on Mars is difficult – only about 50% of all previous Mars landing attempts have succeeded – and these geological features make it even more so. The Perseverance team is building on lessons from previous touchdowns and employing new technologies that enable the spacecraft to target its landing site more accurately and avoid hazards.

Since 1960, more than half of the world's 45 missions there burned up, crashed or otherwise ended in failure, according to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ➥ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-explorati...istorical-log/

The plutonium-powered, six-wheeled rover will drill down (in Jezero Crater) and collect tiny geological specimens that will be brought home in about 2031, in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries.

Mission: Mars 2020
Rover Name: Perseverance
Main Job: Seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for possible return to Earth.
Launch: July 30, 2020
Landing: Feb. 18, 2021
Landing Site: Jezero Crater, Mars

Quick Facts ➥ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Watch ➥ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timel.../watch-online/



https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timel.../watch-online/

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Adelie

I can see how writing Westerns would give him the knowledge and experience to authoritatively describe the details of modern wind turbine generators.

That was more sarcasm than I as a moderator should have publicly expressed. Couldn't help myself. Sorry Newhaul.

Hey we all gotta have fun once in a while
Actually he is the author of the family John was the engineer that worked for General Electric on the turbines and Fred hauls the systems from factories to job sites.
Have others in the oil industry . Heck there are a couple that work in the commercial solar industry as well . Then there is frank he is the Cajun that married into the family.

[Ded reckoner]

Masks detrimental to babies’ speech and language development

Besides being ineffective preventing coronavirus infection, mask wearing causes damage to our youngest. Here are excerpts from one study: “…seeing partially visible faces robs us of a plethora of linguistic signals that are essential for communication…babies begin lip-reading at around 8 months of age…By lip-reading, babies now gain access to visual speech cues…Of course, babies cannot access visible speech cues if others are wearing masks…we also found that bilingual Spanish- and Catalan-learning babies lipread more than their monolingual counterparts, indicating that bilingual babies rely more on visual speech cues to help them keep their two languages apart…once lip-reading emerges in infancy, it becomes the default mode of speech processing whenever comprehension is difficult.” There is, “…other evidence that adults resort to lip-reading when confronted with speech-in-noise, accented speech or foreign-language speech…Overall, the research to date demonstrates that the visible articulations that babies normally see when others are talking play a key role in their acquisition of communication skills. Research also shows that babies who lip-read more have better language skills when they’re older. If so, this suggests that masks probably hinder babies’ acquisition of speech and language.”

[sv_pelagia]

Originally Posted by Ded reckoner

Masks detrimental to babies’ speech and language development

Besides being ineffective preventing coronavirus infection, mask wearing causes damage to our youngest. Here are excerpts from one study: “…seeing partially visible faces robs us of a plethora of linguistic signals that are essential for communication…babies begin lip-reading at around 8 months of age…By lip-reading, babies now gain access to visual speech cues…Of course, babies cannot access visible speech cues if others are wearing masks…we also found that bilingual Spanish- and Catalan-learning babies lipread more than their monolingual counterparts, indicating that bilingual babies rely more on visual speech cues to help them keep their two languages apart…once lip-reading emerges in infancy, it becomes the default mode of speech processing whenever comprehension is difficult.” There is, “…other evidence that adults resort to lip-reading when confronted with speech-in-noise, accented speech or foreign-language speech…Overall, the research to date demonstrates that the visible articulations that babies normally see when others are talking play a key role in their acquisition of communication skills. Research also shows that babies who lip-read more have better language skills when they’re older. If so, this suggests that masks probably hinder babies’ acquisition of speech and language.”

You missed the second part of the title: The good news is that parents can take action to compensate

And its concluding paragraph:
The best advice is that, when outside the home, we should follow CDC’s guidance and always wear a mask; in contrast, when home and unmasked, we should engage in as much en face communication with our babies as possible so that they can see and hear our talking faces in their full splendor. Practicing the latter will ensure that babies’ young brains, which are highly adaptable, will have the opportunity to compensate for the perceptual deprivation that they experience outside the home.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by sv_pelagia

You missed the second part of the title: The good news is that parents can take action to compensate

And its concluding paragraph:
The best advice is that, when outside the home, we should follow CDC’s guidance and always wear a mask; in contrast, when home and unmasked, we should engage in as much en face communication with our babies as possible so that they can see and hear our talking faces in their full splendor. Practicing the latter will ensure that babies’ young brains, which are highly adaptable, will have the opportunity to compensate for the perceptual deprivation that they experience outside the home.

Thanks. My spouse is a Speech Language Pathologist (retired), and as a science journalist I've written about the field. It sure seemed like DR's quote was leaving a lot out. Thanks for posting the full story.

It's also useful to point out this article was published as an Opinion, not as a scientific report. It is based on ongoing research, but is not a scientific conclusion. It is the informed "opinion" of one child psychologist.

[jimbunyard]

Originally Posted by GordMay

NASA's Perseverance rover set to land on Mars, at 3:55 p.m. ET today
If successful, the American rover will join two other spacecraft, that recently entered Mars's orbit: the Amal space probe from the United Arab Emirates and China's Tianwen-1 rover and orbiter duo.

The landing site, Jezero, is a basin where scientists believe an ancient river flowed into a lake and deposited sediments in a fan shape known as a delta. Scientists think the environment here was likely to have preserved signs of any life that gained a foothold billions of years ago – but Jezero also has steep cliffs, sand dunes, and boulder fields. Landing on Mars is difficult – only about 50% of all previous Mars landing attempts have succeeded – and these geological features make it even more so. The Perseverance team is building on lessons from previous touchdowns and employing new technologies that enable the spacecraft to target its landing site more accurately and avoid hazards.

Since 1960, more than half of the world's 45 missions there burned up, crashed or otherwise ended in failure, according to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ➥ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-explorati...istorical-log/

The plutonium-powered, six-wheeled rover will drill down (in Jezero Crater) and collect tiny geological specimens that will be brought home in about 2031, in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries.

Mission: Mars 2020
Rover Name: Perseverance
Main Job: Seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) for possible return to Earth.
Launch: July 30, 2020
Landing: Feb. 18, 2021
Landing Site: Jezero Crater, Mars

Quick Facts ➥ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Watch ➥ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timel.../watch-online/



https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timel.../watch-online/

Aww, come on. We all know none of that stuff's real.

It's all just fillmed in a Hollywood basement...

[Jamme]

Originally Posted by jimbunyard

Aww, come on. We all know none of that stuff's real. It's all just fillmed in a Hollywood basement...

It’s actually true, and I’m glad to report they were finally able to prove once for all that even Mars is flat.

[Adelie]

Originally Posted by jimbunyard

Aww, come on. We all know none of that stuff's real.



It's all just fillmed in a Hollywood basement...

Yep, the writers for that are right next to the ones where the CF writers cook up most of the posts on this forum. There are really only a handful of actual CF members, bet you can’t figure out who the real members are.

[Lodesman]

Originally Posted by Adelie

Yep, the writers for that are right next to the ones where the CF writers cook up most of the posts on this forum. There are really only a handful of actual CF members, bet you can’t figure out who the real members are.

I knew it!

I've always suspected that I'm just an illusion.