STRANGE WORLD

stoweboyd:

futuresagency (Stowe Boyd):

Once the avante garde get their hands on low-cost 3D printed robots, the world could be a different place:

Abby Abazorius via MITnews

MIT is leading an ambitious new project to reinvent how robots are designed and produced. Funded by a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the project will aim to develop a desktop technology that would make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours. “This research envisions a whole new way of thinking about the design and manufacturing of robots, and could have a profound impact on society,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, leader of the project and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “We believe that it has the potential to transform manufacturing and to democratize access to robots.”

via wildcat2030

climateadaptation:

“During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to “create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.” Last week, President Obama fulfilled that promise with the rollout of Ethics.gov, which “brings records and data from across the federal government to one central location, making it easier for citizens to hold public officials accountable.”

Ethics.gov is available to the public and allows anyone to access and search the records of seven different databases:

• White House Visitor Records;

• Office of Government Ethics Travel Reports;

• Lobbying Disclosure Act Data;

• Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act Data;

• Federal Election Commission Individual Contribution Reports;

• Federal Election Commission Candidate Reports; and

• Federal Election Commission Committee Reports.

According to a White House press release, the database includes millions of White House visitor records, records for entities registered with the Federal Election Commission such as PACs, records for each candidate who has either registered with the FEC or appeared on a ballot list prepared by a state elections office, lobbying registrations, and much more.

On his Sunlight Foundation blog, John Wonderlich, who is Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation and an advocate for open government, wrote that while Ethics.gov fulfilled the president’s pledge, “neither money and politics research nor executive branch oversight are going to be revolutionized by this search page — at least not yet.” He added that while it will not happen immediately, the site could become a primary destination for investigative journalists or ethics officials.”

More here and here.

bostonmagazine.com

MON­DAY MORN­ING BEGINS with the chime of bells. Blink­ing awake, I turn toward the noise, paw­ing at my bed­side table in search of my phone. With a quick tap the bells are silenced, as if some­one has abrupt­ly cut the ropes in the bel­fr…

(Source: futuramb)

sociolab:

stealthbananas:

Want to stay technologically innovative? Want a vibrant, adaptive economy full of workers unafraid to start businesses & explore their full potential? Free college. Hell, go one step further & pay students to study.

List of countries with free post-secondary education

• Argentina
• Brazil
• Denmark
• Finland
• Greece
• Hungary
• Malta
• Morocco
• Norway
• Scotland
• Sri Lanka
• Sweden
• Trinidad and Tobago
• Barbados
• Kenya

[Incomplete list; Germany also has extensive free college education, for example.]

Not at all universities though.  Some do charge tuition, but it’s only around $1000.  They do have American-style universities too, which are really expensive.

stoweboyd:

Briegmann wonders if the driverless (autonomous) car would lead to reduced congestion, but also greater sprawl?

Robert Bruegmann via Bloomberg

The driverless car might well substantially alter all the equations: the division between public and private, the collective and individual. Transportation policy has never been as clear as the polemics on the subject would suggest. The taxi, for example, has long shared characteristics of each. In recent years, the divide between public and private transport has been further eroded with the Zipcar (ZIP), Super Shuttle and other on- demand vehicles such as Personal Rapid Transit, a system of small automated vehicles running on guideways. A pioneering and successful example of PRT, constructed in the 1970s, can still be seen in operation in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Flexible System

What the driverless automobile might do is further break down the distinctions. Suppose an individual can summon a vehicle on demand — a small capsule like a golf cart for doing errands in the city, for example, or something more like a van to transport a track team to another city — and that vehicle can go directly from starting point to destination. The flexibility this system could provide might well reduce the incentive for owning an automobile, which has to serve all purposes, is expensive to buy and maintain, and in most cases spends most of its time taking up valuable space in a garage or parking lot.

If the driverless car reduces congestion by maximizing the use of existing highways and taking passengers farther and faster with greater comfort, it could lead to even more dispersed cities. But it could also have the opposite effect.

Given the large amount of space devoted to roads and parking in American cities, even minor increases in collective use of vehicles could lead to less need for new pavement and parking and to higher residential and commercial densities. This would reinforce a trend that is already visible, as new development at the far suburban edge of most urban regions is currently being created at higher densities than in the past and there is a great deal of infill in city centers and close-in suburbs.

Although the driverless automobile, like almost every technological advance, will undoubtedly bring on a great many new problems, it could also help ease several existing problems caused by the automobile, notably traffic fatalities and congestion.

My bet is that the transition will follow an S curve of adoption, with very different models at different stages. At first, when less than 15% of the population use auto-autos it will be like today’s electric cars: a personal choice, but basically leading to only small changes in the ecosystem: for example, very few chargers at strip malls and offices. It is only after the early majority start to adopt auto-autos that things will really change, and I bet it will unfold fastest in cities.

Bruegman mentions taxis as vehicles that have elements of both public and private transportation. What happens, though, when taxis are autonomous, and no longer require taxi drivers? First of all, they become much much cheaper. Let’s imagine that 50% of the expense of a taxi is the human driving it. So taxi fares could — would — drop by at least half, and probably more, including the tip!

Stackable city cars like these are the taxis of the future

In such a scenario, those living anywhere with a high enough population density to support taxis would have very strong motivations to not own a car, much more so that today, even given taxis, Zipcar and other public transport. In areas of lower density, even those where taxis are not really viable in large numbers, taxis would become much more prevalent.

My sense is that this would allow for a strong incentive for people to move from lower to higher density areas, along with the added benefit of not requiring parking for the no-longer necessary car.

smarterplanet:

Will we all be on-line, all the time wearing AR glasses?

It’s just as Neal Stephenson predicted in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash. His detective tracks a murderer through both the real world and the virtual world with the help of his on-line specs.

via davesdailysip:

smarterplanet:

Stanford researchers may have solved the problem of range anxiety by wireless charging technology that could one day create an electric highway.

Wireless recharging already is used by some electric vehicle charging stations to fill up batteries without cords or plugging into an outlet. MIT helped pioneer this technology and spun it off into a wireless charging startup, WiTricity. However, Stanford researchers improved on this concept and devised a way to transmit 10 kilowatts of electric power across a 6.5-foot distance with minimal energy loss. By overcoming transmitting electricity across a significant distance, researchers will make it possible to pave a highway with wireless conduits that can provide addition power to EVs and let them operate indefinitely.

infoneer-pulse:

» via CNET