Traffic Jams!

Ecogeek reported yesterday on a company called INRIX and how their traffic database could potentially save a bit of the planet. And oil and money.

Collectively, we spend a huge amount of money and expend a huge amount of co2 during traffic jams that could be someway addressed using hardware/software in your car communicating with centralised software which can alert all other cars with similar hardware/software to potential traffic jams and their avoidance by plotting routes around the areas.

Be great if it worked in Dublin and Cork etc. but the software/hardware would have to be fairly special given our infrastructure and use of cars (apparently 60% of cars parked in Dublin are civil servants'). The machines would have to wake us up earlier, tell our bosses to allow us to go home earlier, sort us out when a wheelbarrow overturns on the M50...

You can post questions on the ecogeek site if you have any - the owner is going to interview the CEO of INRIX in the near future.

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1658/69/

People attemting to use software to solve chaotic systems always wrecks my head. They're welcome to try, but I won't be holding my breath.

Is Microsoft the operating platform?

Okay forget my question. Found this.

I can just see it now: you're stuck in the middle of nowhere thanks to your new computer and it's just crashed. "Cannot connect to the internet. Would you like to connect to the internet to see if this problem can be resolved?"

Hermes wrote:

Okay forget my question. Found this.

I can just see it now: you're stuck in the middle of nowhere thanks to your new computer and it's just crashed. "Cannot connect to the internet. Would you like to connect to the internet to see if this problem can be resolved?"

You may have been wise enough to hold on to your fold-out map. Just in case the very unlikely event you describe above was to occur.

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Hermes wrote:

Okay forget my question. Found this.

I can just see it now: you're stuck in the middle of nowhere thanks to your new computer and it's just crashed. "Cannot connect to the internet. Would you like to connect to the internet to see if this problem can be resolved?"

You may have been wise enough to hold on to your fold-out map. Just in case the very unlikely event you describe above was to occur.

Lol. The map would be very handy so long as you know where you are. The HELP function on your system might put you beyond rational thought though and beyond caring where you are. I know, I've been there many times

microsoft are coming out with prog called clearflow to do just that, but it won't work there never enough alternative routes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7475986.stm

We might be seeing the end of internet names like www.machinenation.forumakers.com and instead start to see

Machine Nation
Politics Dot IE
The CLR
Ard Taoiseach Homepage...

Quote :

A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris.

The net's regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called "top-level" domain names, such as .com or .uk.

The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.

A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in scripts, such as Asian and Arabic, was also approved.

"We are opening up a new world and I think this cannot be underestimated," said Roberto Gaetano, a member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

About shaggin time

lostexpectation wrote:

microsoft are coming out with prog called clearflow to do just that, but it won't work there never enough alternative routes.

Visions of that paper clip appearing in the middle of a traffic jam. "Looks like you are trying to find your way to Istanbul? Do you need some help"?



I think they killed the clip off, shame really it was so so Microsoft.

Squire wrote:

lostexpectation wrote:

microsoft are coming out with prog called clearflow to do just that, but it won't work there never enough alternative routes.

Visions of that paper clip appearing in the middle of a traffic jam. "Looks like you are trying to find your way to Istanbul? Do you need some help"?



I think they killed the clip off, shame really it was so so Microsoft.

No, no shame at all. It was for the good of humanity that the clip was snipped. That arrogant little prick was the bane of word processors and office workers everywhere.

Renewable Energy World are reporting that software used in Germany can reliably predict upto 4 days of wind power in advance.

Quote :

Thanks to a new system developed by a German university spin-off, it's now possible to obtain an accurate forecast of the energy output from wind parks for up to ten days in advance.

The Previento system, developed at Oldenburg University in northern Germany in cooperation with researchers from Denmark's Riso National Laboratory, can predict not only how much electricity a specific wind park in Germany will produce but also the total amount of electricity the 20,000 or so wind parks dotted around the country will generate in the coming days and with a high level of accuracy.

Armed with these predictions, Germany's grid operators can now calculate the amount of additional electricity they will need from fossil-fuel plants to compensate for troughs in wind output — and so ensure the expected power demand is covered reliably.

Why they need it is another question for me - if their fossil-fuel burning stations are sensitive to electricity already in the grid don't they switch off or turn themselves down? At present it wouldn't seem so if this is anything to go by..

Quote :

"The German electricity industry has to able to plan today how much electricity it will need tomorrow as well as how that electricity will be produced. That is what our system helps them to do," Dr. Matthias Lange from energy & meteo systems, the Oldenburg spin-off, said.

"Accurate predictions about wind power allow grid operators to save millions of euros through efficient scheduling," he added.

A system that can predict how much electricity is going to be available from wind power for the national grid has become so important in Germany because wind's share of the country's electricity generation is growing all the time, and reshaping the electricity industry.

The Germans have put a lot of effort into their wind program and currently get over 7% of their electricity from wind and they're adamant to make it grow according to this

Quote :

Wind power accounted for 7.2 percent of Germany's total electricity consumption at the end of 2007 with 22,200 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity.

According to the German Wind Energy Association (BWE), installed capacity is set to double by 2020 with 45,000 MW installed on land and 10,000 MW offshore.

In fact, the BWE estimates that every fourth kilowatt hour of electricity will be coming from wind power within 12 years.

Wind, they think will be this important

Quote :

"The amount of wind power used today in Germany is so big that all the other types of power plants have to adapt themselves around the wind power output and increase or decrease their contribution depending on what wind does," said Lange.

Because Previento can give plenty of warning about big deviations and sudden peaks and troughs in wind power output, it also plays a big role in the regional energy spot markets. The amount of wind power entering the grid impacts electricity prices: the more wind power available, the lower the electricity price becomes, Lange explained. This is because less conventional energy has to be purchased by energy providers for the next few days to cover the expected demand.

So how does it work? Sensors everywhere around the place ..

Quote :

The system calculates the amount of wind available at any particular location using a variety of weather models available from multiple weather services. The German Weather Services, for example, supplies information on wind speed, wind direction, pressure and a vertical temperature profile for rectangular grids with a resolution of 7 kilometers.

Previento processes this data and combines it with data about the features of local terrain of a wind park, such as the amount of wooded area or the bodies of water around a wind park to form an accurate estimation of the electricity output at any given time.

The system is proving a global hit with interest in it coming from Spain, Scandinavia, America, Canada and Ireland.

Again on mapping weather data for the purposes of assessing potential wind-turbine performance. As time goes on, more and more sensory data will come out of machines attached to places in the world - the existing turbines themselves are even crude sensory equipment - and so databases of GIS data can be accumulated, maybe even for with the potential to pre-empt weather conditions.

The system described below in Cleantechnica is Opensource.

Quote :

A New York software company has announced the scheduled release of its open-source wind farm design software. Albany-based AWS TrueWind designed the openWind software so that a range of end users, from individuals to wind energy developers, could apply and adapt the software their own particular set of data.

We’ve written extensively about the marriage of GIS mapping and renewable energy here at CleanTechnica. Proper testing of the given renewable resource is a critical component of any installation, and the step taken forward with this new openWind project—along with similar such releases from 3TIER and the EPA—will continue to make the process of testing sites more efficient and cost-effective.

The openWind application is built around standard GIS data types and employs a GIS-style interface to allow seamless integration of geographic and modeling data. The application is fully compatible with other leading brands, making cross-platform collaboration much easier.

Scientist develops programme to understand alien languages

Some hash-head in a university in Leeds has been working on a computer progam which pretends to decipher what aliens might be saying.

Quote :

A computer programme which could help identify and even translate messages from aliens in outer space has been developed by a British scientist.
# Nasa to beam Beatles' track across space
# UK astronomers to broadcast adverts to aliens
# Scientists tune in to 'radio message from the aliens'

Even if there are extra terrestrials are one day discovered, scientists fear their alien tongue may make it impossible to understand them.

But John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University believes he has come up with software which at least will decipher the structure of their language - and be the first step in understanding what they are saying.

Why ? Maybe someone somewhere has cottoned on to the idea that aliens might not be friendly at all and might want to kill us so we should try to have a fair idea what they're saying if they ever come into the radar so we can ... run away from them.

How they propose to do this is the best bit though - by comparing several human languages...

Quote :

Dr Elliott's programme would compare an alien language to a database of 60 different languages in the world to search see if it has a similar structure. He believes that even an alien language far removed from any on Earth is likely to have recognisable patterns that could help reveal how intelligent the life forms are.

"Language has to be structured in a certain way otherwise it will be inefficient and unwieldy," he told New Scientist magazine. Previous research had shown that it is possible to determine whether a signal carries a language rather than an image or music.

All human languages have "functional terms" that bracket phrases - words like "if" and "but" in English. According to Dr Elliott, such terms in any language, are separated by up to nine words or characters. This limit on phrase length seems to correspond to the level of human cognition - how much information we are able to process at once.

In an alien language, analysing these phrases might make it possible to gauge how clever the authors of the message are. If they are much smarter than us, there would a lot of words packed into the phrases.

Massive assumptions about a universal structure of language.

Quote :

The programme should also be able to break a language up into crucial words such as nouns and verbs, even though their meaning is unknown. It can, for instance, locate adjectives from the fact that they are almost always next to nouns. Because languages have different word orders, Dr Elliott is amassing a library of the syntaxes of 60 human tongues.

I suppose they'd test it out on dolphins only that it's intended to apply to human aliens.

Scientist develops programme to understand alien languages