Sorry for the paucity of posts – real life, and specifically preparation for another semester of teaching, intrudes!
However, I’m excited that Larvatus Prodeo has been revived for the 2013 federal election, and I’ll be contributing posts there for the next few months.
I may still have the occasional post here for material that doesn’t fit on LP, however.
Well, thanks to Russia’s corrupt cops and dodgy insurance, we have an abundance of footage of the most damaging (and spectacular) meteorite impact in at least a century:
Inevitably, there is a bigger, more damaging asteroid out there with our name on it, and sooner or later one will hit a major city.
While there is some dark amusement in certain political circles at conservatives suggesting that funding for climate change mitigation be cut to pay for asteroid defence, that shouldn’t preclude some more serious consideration of whether we can or should be doing anything about the risk.
This kind of headlinedrives me more and more up the wall:
Gillard’s school plan a costly failure
A $16 million federal Labor commitment to stem the shortage of maths and science teachers by fast-tracking bankers, accountants and engineers into classrooms has been an expensive failure with just 14 participants recruited.
I agree that it didn’t work. But costly?
As it turns out, that only $8 million will actually be spent on the program by the time it winds up, as $8 million will be redirected to another teacher recruitment program.
In the context of a $360 billion federal budget, 8 million is chicken feed. And in a budget of that size, there are guaranteed to be dozens of programs of similar or greater magnitude that don’t work perfectly. In fact, there should be a certain proportion of programs that don’t work; governments should experiment with new ideas, keep and possibly expand the ones that work and discard the ones that don’t. Which appears to be what has happened here.
As the actual report goes on to explain, the failure of the program relates to a number of things – states requiring that teachers be fully qualified in the traditional way before entering the classroom, potential recruits not being willing to work in the schools that actually require more teachers, and difficulties of transferring across state boundaries. Perhaps some of these things were knowable beforehand, but the unwillingness of recruits to work in the required areas? I doubt it.
If the government had been warned that the program was unlikely to work and proceeded anyway; if the program was hundreds of millions of dollars rather than tens, or if they hadn’t repurposed the money once it was clear it was misconceived they might deserve a bollocking for incompetence. But at this stage this seems entirely like the normal business of government. Running headlines supporting Christopher Pyne’s preferred narratives is not only misleading, it is ultimately corrosive to good government, by encouraging such risk aversion that governments never try anything that might be a good idea.
This is a simple one – but, nevertheless I reckon it could be very useful.
Taking the bins out, and bringing them back in again, is a pretty simple task, one that children the developed world over are tasked with. It’s also a pain in the neck if it’s cold, raining, you’re away on bin night, or worst of all if you forget to take the bins out!
It’s a simple enough task, in fact, that it just screams out for a robot to do it.
The beauty of a robot wheelie bin – or a wheelie bin mover – is the simplicity of the task. While a full wheelie bin can be quite heavy, they don’t need to be moved in any particular hurry – in fact, you would want it to move very slowly for safety. There’s no need for complex hands, legs, or anything like that.
From a hardware engineering point of view, there would be a number of challenges, most notably whether the robotics would stay attached to the bin at all times, including when emptied into the truck, or would be physically separate. Achieving sufficient stability to avoid spillage would also be a challenge. But these are all likely to be fairly easily solvable. The Wheeliesafe electric bin trolley, indeed, solves many of the issues.
The software problems for the robot are the interesting ones:
These all pose their own challenges, not least to ensure that any closed door is not left open, and particularly if you assume “dumb” infrastructure (such as existing electrically operated garage doors). But it seems to me that these are all solvable in the medium term.
And it would be a fun engineering project!
These high school kids have had a partial crack, but it’s not clear whether it’s simply a remote-controlled wheelie bin or truly autonomous. Using a solar panel to charge the bin is pretty smart.
Warning: this post is about a new type of gun. I’ll explain what it is and how it works before discussing the moral questions it poses.
Firing a rifle accurately, even over relatively short ranges, isn’t easy. Firing a rifle accurately over long ranges takes a certain amount of talent and a great deal of practice.
Even when one has mastered the basic skill of getting the shot to travel on the initial trajectory you want it to go, over long ranges that’s not enough. Bullets do not travel like a laser beam; they follow a parabola due to gravity and aerodynamic drag, drag that varies according to atmospheric conditions. They are affected by the wind, too. All of this requires you to adjust your aim point. And, particularly if you’re like me in my few attempts at firing a rifle, your aim will wobble around a certain amount.
Not, apparently, with the Tracking Point rifle, (corporate site here) that uses a computer to compensate for all these things automatically.
In Part 3, I noted that one of the most time consuming tasks in the modern kitchen is simply moving objects from place to place; the utility of high-performance but specialized kitchen tools is limited by the time it takes to retrieve them from the cupboard, set them on the bench, wash them, then put them away. Washing dishes may be mostly automated, but loading and unloading the dishwasher isn’t. And so on.
While better designed kitchens can help to some extent, we are probably reaching diminishing returns in that area. What is required is technology that can automate the process of moving kitchen utensils from place to place; for this, we turn again to the technology of robotics.
Self-described “transit geeks” from around the world are starting to think about driverless cars, and what they might mean for their vision of a less car-dependent world. Ron Kilcoyne, manager of a public transport system in Eugene, Oregon, has some interesting points to make, though not ones I would all necessarily accept.
I agree with one of his most fundamental points – that no matter how much more efficiently driverless cars will make traffic flow, conventionally sized vehicles carrying a single person can never be as efficient a use of space as bicycles, heavily loaded public transport, or pedestrians. But that doesn’t mean that current transit architectures will continue to make sense in a world where all motorized transport is controlled by computers rather than a person. While a detailed analysis of the possibilities would be a very large work and will undoubtedly be made to look foolish by history, there are some fairly obvious examples of how the relative advantages of transit, and transit modes, are altered by autonomous vehicles.
For instance, minibuses are not heavily used by public transit systems in most of the developed world – though they are ubiquitous in some parts of Asia. While transport unions and the taxi companies play some part in this, it’s basically a simple question of economics. If you have to pay a bus driver, you may as well pay for a bus that can take large numbers of people. If the bus driver is no longer part of the equation, smaller vehicles that match demand better, and allow more point-to-point runs, might make more sense.
Or, to take another example, if buses can run in tightly-spaced platoons, the capacity per unit of space advantages of trains are rather less compelling than they once were.
On the other hand, if mode-shifting becomes less of an issue, minimising congestion might well mean that transit of one form or another into really heavily trafficked areas – CBD’s, for instance – will become even more popular than it already is.
One thing’s almost certain. When they arrive, driverless taxis will render obsolete the irregular and minimally-patronized bus services of the outer suburbs catering for those too young, old, poor, or otherwise unable to drive themselves.
