May 20, 2013, 7:57 am

Genius in Helsinki!

By Raymond Refuerzo

The New York Times reports on the latest technological advances that are commonplace in Europe.

On the standard Departures monitor, you’ll notice at least two other bits of useful information. First, there’s the little walking-person column; it tells you how many minutes away your gate is, by foot. Genius!

Just to its left, there’s an actual arrow that shows you which way to walk. Further genius! The monitor knows which way you’re facing, of course, because you’re looking at it; why not use little arrows to point you to your destination?

This design shows that the monitor designers don’t just care about displaying the gate information; they care about you getting there in time for your flight.

 

May 15, 2013, 11:27 am

Volvo now using radar, cameras on cars to improve cyclist’s safety

By Raymond Refuerzo

Fast Company looks at Volvo’s updated safety system to its vehicles that it claims will protect cyclists.

The feature, unveiled at the Geneva Motor show yesterday, is an update to its pedestrian detection system which it launched in 2010, and alerts the driver via a siren, deploying the vehicle’s brakes when it detects a two-wheeler in its path. Road safety campaigners, however, say that the system is no replacement for driver caution.

The system–Volvo takes its innovations in the sphere of driver safely very seriously indeed–works using a grille-mounted radar and a camera embedded in the rear-view mirror, but needs a more powerful processor than its predecessor. The downside of this means that the system has to be installed directly in the factory, and will cost an extra $2,775 for consumers.

Photo Credit: Richard Mason

 

May 9, 2013, 4:51 pm

The World’s Top 100 Airports

By Raymond Refuerzo

World Airport Awards releases the top 100 Airports.

May 8, 2013, 5:40 pm

Make sure you stay secure on wi-fi networks

By Raymond Refuerzo

Mashable shares this infographic that shows how hackers can access your computer.

May 7, 2013, 4:58 pm

Street Smarts: From Holland, Bright Ideas for Highways

By Raymond Refuerzo

The NewYork Times reports on a planned road that would glow at night after light-sensitive material stores energy during the day.

If cars, traffic and navigation can be “smart,” is there any reason for roads to remain as dumb as bricks? Not according to the unlikely combination of Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch art-school bohemian, and Heijmans, a conventionally minded infrastructure developer, who are teaming up on an array of quirky, interactive designs that could change the way streets look and even act.

Their futuristic products include glow-in-the-dark road markings, interactive streetlights, battery-charging e-lanes and illuminated foul-weather warnings, among other innovations. And they are not alone in Europe in rethinking the highway landscape in an age of high technology; they may simply be out in front.

The first pilot project, done pro bono by the creators, is to become reality this year along a 150-yard strip of trial road in Brabant, a Dutch province on the Belgian border. The idea is that luminescent green road markings painted on the road will make street lighting redundant. This is intended not just to save lighting costs, but also to increase safety by improving visibility on roads that had no lights at all.

Photo Credit: Daan Roosegaarde

May 6, 2013, 8:16 pm

Parkatmyhouse.com helps property owners raise extra cash by renting out their empty parking spots

By Raymond Refuerzo

NYdailynews reports on An online parking marketplace matches homeowners with drivers looking for parking space.

Based in the U.K., the website is making a big push into the tri-state area, Boston, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. ParkatmyHouse.com matches homeowners, business owners, churches and schools who have spare parking space with drivers looking for a place to park.

Launched six years ago, ParkatmyHouse has so far taken in $5 million in fees for people, mostly in the U.K. who have listed on its site. After a recent round of financing led by German car giant BMW, it is hoping to do the same in the U.S.

It is free to list your space. ParkatmyHouse, which just opened an office in the West Village, takes a 15% commission from each transaction. Sometimes people who park at a home will arrange for the homeowner to drive them to their destination.

Photo Credit: Andrew Gombert/ EPA

May 5, 2013, 4:52 pm

A New French Skyscraper That Stretches to the Sky

By Raymond Refuerzo

Gizmodo looks at the new skyscraper that stretches to the sky.

When you gaze at architecture firm Zaha Hadid‘s new tower, you imagine two jazz hands raising up to the sky as high as they stretch.

Located in Marseille, the skyscraper is the headquarters of French shipping and container company CMA CGM. It’s nearly 500 feet tall, and although the upward reaching form is the most central feature of its design, the architects also paid attention to the lower level too. Apparently it’s located in a pretty busy area, on top of an elevated highway. So the bottom portion extends horizontally to relate to the movement of the traffic of pedestrians, cars, boats, and so forth. They still look like jazz hands though.

Photo Credit

May 2, 2013, 4:47 pm

Terminal Illness: Readers’ Best and Worst Airports

By Raymond Refuerzo

The Best and Worst Airports according to Freakonomics

At the top of the list of best airports, by a long way, was Amsterdam’s Schiphol. I have not flown into Schiphol myself, but I’m not at all surprised by this ranking, as the Dutch are genius urban planners. Schiphol has a branch of the Rijksmuseum art museum, displaying actual old masters, and a shopping mall which is open to the public as well as travelers.

Among American airports, high scorers were Charlotte (rocking chairs in the terminals), Austin, Baltimore-Washington, San Francisco, Denver, Tampa, Detroit (“so pretty, and well-designed, that main water fountain is gorgeous; maybe I just liked it because I had low expectations going into it, being Detroit”—xq), and Portland (has a mall with stores forbidden to charge prices higher than their off-airport locations, and live pianists).

However, one thing that clearly comes through is that the U.S. airports stack up poorly against their foreign counterparts. No American airport has reached the level of culture and sophistication of Munich, which features a mini golf course on the premises. And the South Korean airports draw raves, these about Seoul:

Easily the most hated airports are:

Los Angeles LAX

London Heathrow (at least almost all of Heathrow)

Chicago O’Hare

Miami

Atlanta

And worst of all, the airport this survey suggests is perhaps the most hated in America:

LaGuardia

May 1, 2013, 5:43 pm

Crosswalks in New York Are Not Havens, Study Finds

By Raymond Refuerzo

The New York Times takes to the New York streets to show how new research trumps traditional ideas about pedestrian and bike safety.

Pedestrians struck by cars are most often hit while in the crosswalk, with the signal on their side. Taxicabs pose a disproportionate threat to cyclists, who often compete for the same sliver of curbside roadway.

In some cases, it seemed, the awareness level of the pedestrian or cyclist may have been compromised. Among patients 18 and older, 15 percent of pedestrians and 11 percent of cyclists were found to have consumed alcohol before the collision — a figure that stood out to transportation officials whose focus is often reckless driving.

About 8 percent of both pedestrians and cyclists said they were injured while using an electronic device, including a cellphone or music player. For victims ages 7 to 17, the numbers climbed to more than 10 percent of pedestrians and nearly 30 percent of cyclists.

In a finding unlikely to surprise the city’s cyclists, about 40 percent of injured riders were hit by taxis, compared with 25 percent of the pedestrians. More than 80 percent of cyclists rode with traffic flow, but less than a third wore helmets.

Photo Credit

April 30, 2013, 7:07 pm

The Bikes and the Fury

By Raymond Refuerzo

NewYork Times reports on the city’s bike share program.

The city’s long-anticipated bike share program is scheduled to make its debut in May, allowing New Yorkers to pick up and deposit rental bikes at hundreds of locations, most of them, so far, in some of the wealthiest neighborhoods.

So is this really the time to complain — this, a moment when progressive policy has had such an obvious victory? Virtually everything about the city’s growing bike culture has prompted vigorous argument and even fury.

On Wednesday night, a litany of grievances were heard at a town-hall meeting in Clinton Hill, in Brooklyn, which had been organized by Councilwoman Letitia James to address concerns about the way in which the bike program was unfolding. The undercurrent was the contest between young and old, between churchgoer and heathen, between the preservationist and the futurist, the realist and the skeptic.

The area of disconnect the bike share program has most egregiously exposed is the one between the city’s understanding of community outreach and the way that information is received and processed in any given neighborhood.

Photo Credit: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

 

April 29, 2013, 7:09 pm

Voice-to-Text Just as Unsafe as Touch Texting, Study Finds

By Raymond Refuerzo

Wired reports on how unsafe Voice to text feature against touch texting.

Voice control may be the way of the future, but a new study finds that using voice-to-text is just as unsafe as texting behind the wheel.

The study, conducted by Texas A&M’s transportation institute, had 43 participants drive a closed course. Then they drove the same course while typing a text, then they drove it using a voice-to-text system. The results: Driver response times were delayed no matter what method was used.

For every minute of baseline time behind the wheel, drivers would spend an average of 37.3 seconds looking forward at the road (obviously, that doesn’t include checking the speedometer, mirrors and dash-mounted light). When texting manually, that average dropped to 27.2 seconds. When using Siri, drivers were looking up for an average of 28.6 seconds, while the Vlingo method dropped it down to 25.8 seconds.

What’s even more interesting in A&M’s findings is that manual texting sometimes took less time than using a voice-to-text system, although according to the study, “driver performance was roughly the same with both.”

Video Credit

 

April 28, 2013, 5:25 pm

Failure is not an option. Failure is Inevitable.

By Garrick Infanger

Wired looks at failure.

Building 4 is Ford’s Tough Testing Center, where the company evaluates nearly all of its nonengine parts, from seat belts to axle assemblies. The facility is a monument to a dark truth of manufacturing: Even the best-engineered products fail. Some percentage of all mechanical devices will break before they’re expected to. “Companies come to me and say they want to be 100 percent failure-free after three years,” says Fred Schenkelberg, whose firm, FMS Reliability, estimates the lifespan of products. “But that’s impossible. You can’t do it.”…

This is why the sprawling hangar-size rooms of Ford’s Building 4 are full of machines. Machines that open and close doors, robots that rub padded appendages on seats, treadmills that spin tires until they erupt in a cloud of white smoke. There’s even a giant bay where an entire Ford pickup is held up in the air by pistons that violently shake the vehicle by its suspension. Officially, Building 4 is about reliability, but it’s actually more about inevitability. Ford isn’t trying to ensure the gas-pedal hinge will never break. The company knows it will break; its engineers are trying to understand when—and how and why—this will happen.

Product failure is deceptively difficult to understand. It depends not just on how customers use a product but on the intrinsic properties of each part—what it’s made of and how those materials respond to wildly varying conditions. Estimating a product’s lifespan is an art that even the most sophisticated manufacturers still struggle with. And it’s getting harder. In our Moore’s law-driven age, we expect devices to continuously be getting smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more efficient. This thinking has seeped into our expectations about lots of product categories: Cars must get better gas mileage. Bicycles must get lighter. Washing machines need to get clothes cleaner with less water. Almost every industry is expected to make major advances every year. To do this they are constantly reaching for new materials and design techniques. All this is great for innovation, but it’s terrible for reliability.

Photo: Christopher Griffith