That's why I have a personal policy of always costing them more money than they seize from me. You confiscated $400 from me? I'm going to arrange to use more than $400 in police resources. I will mail you enough letters that you'll spend more than $400 just responding to them. I'll sue in small claims court so you have to send a representative to get it tossed out, then hire a lawyer to send fancy letters forcing the department to hire another fancy lawyer to send responses back.
Publishing is the first step of the peer review process.
Actually, I'd say writing the paper is step 1, Step 2 is the paper being accepted by the journal, where it is then sent out to peers for review Step 3 is the peer review, if it passes - Step 4 is final editing and publication
With numbers like that, the batteries don't sound all that expensive. How many batteries you would need per bus depends on a number of factors. Charge time is a big one.
Well, a quick search shows 260-360 horsepower for buses. An 85 kwh Model S is 362 hp. Now, I know that HP is far from the only factor, torque is as well, which is why buses and other large industrial vehicles tend towards massive diesel engines rather than fairly small gasoline engines that produce more 'power' on paper by the horsepower spec.
Mainly because the smaller engine will tear itself to pieces in short order if asked to do the duty cycle of the bigger engine. Still, electric motors are notoriously tough, but to my thinking a model S drivetrain would be an excellent stand-in as being for hybrid components for a bus.
Now, a Model S manages 265 miles off it's battery with a vehicle that's extremely aerodynamic and only weighing 4,647.3 lbs*. Meanwhile a bus isn't aerodynamic, and I'm seeing 22, 28, and even 40k pounds. That gives me electric ranges of 56, 44, and 31 miles of range per 85kwh battery pack, if you figure that lower average speeds allows the battery pack to mostly scale linearly. I'm also seeing 4 mpg for a bus - which would translate to 24 mpg for the model S of you compare the 28k pound 44 mile and multiply by the divider, so it sounds about right.
In addition we know that the wheelbase on a Model S is 116" and that the battery fits between the wheels. So a 45' bus should be able to fit at least 4 of them, assuming that with a width of up to 102" you couldn't fit the batteries in sideways.
That's without figuring on stuff like stacking the batteries on top of each other. My conclusion is that there isn't any need for roof mounting, removable seats, or even trailers for extra battery storage. If you want to save the battery weight, simply unmount them and leave the packs back at the station.
*I'll note that for a car the model S is actually pretty heavy, but we're comparing it to a bus here.
I think it's funny that you didn't consider the casualties as a negative as well.;)
Super-capacitors don't currently have a price advantage over batteries for these uses - not enough range off them even if they can provide the necessary power.
They're blaming emissions standards that cost fuel. Personally, I have a hard time with systems that burn more fuel for 'less emissions'. There should be ways to do both, but from doing my research as I was considering a diesel vehicle, there's a LOT of angst over this right now because they killed a lot of diesel's mileage advantage with the new emissions standards. There's even forum posts out there on how to re-tune engines 'the old way' to get the mileage back.
A electrically powered bus with overhead wires _and_ a battery could go down every road, more or less.
A hybrid system is a good idea, but in 'most' cases would be used where the overhead wires already exist due to the capital costs being sunk.
As such, putting a battery into them is a good way to extend the range of your electric buses beyond the wiring, but I tend to picture it like a heat map. Depending on the size of the battery you put in, it's only a 'temporary' fix if the city keeps expanding.
1. Battery Swap stations. If you think the driver would need to 'hop out' you should check out Tesla's swap video. However, the problem here is capital in nature - you have to build the station(s) and populate them with batteries. Going with a Tesla model S 85 kwh battery gives us a very conservative $22k per battery - you'd get less range powering a bus than an efficient car, and currently Tesla is paying the least per kwh of any EV manufacturer. Going with a relatively small time bus maker? The battery will almost certainly be more expensive. 2. Battery Trailer: Some of these buses are already long enough, and another set of axles adds complexity to an already extra-long vehicle.
As one of the ACs mentioned, the wires are 'ugly'. The other problem is that running a wire power network that meets today's safety requirements is expensive, thus only good in areas toeing the line of where subways and such would be logical.
It's also a question of flexibility. Sure, the bus doesn't need to go down every road, but they more or less can, providing flexibility. If it'd cost a few million to install new lines to provide electricity to the buses, they're less likely to change/extend the routes.
With batteries becoming so much better, it's actually a good question as to whether they're cheaper today than the power lines.
I would hope that a computerized car that swerved or pulled over would make sure to at least hit less obstructions than the original obstruction.
Well yes. But the scenario I was picturing was for the typical wildlife strike - dark highway with foliage on the sides and an animal/person that you don't know what it's going to do. Swerving into oncoming traffic would be bad, you might not have enough margin on the side to dodge that way.
This is a valid point if it is truly quicker to stop than it is to change lanes. I kindof doubt that is the case at highway speeds though.
I agree, it's something for the programmers to simulate and test. You need a lane to change into though.
There are other factors as well. There used to be a broad scientific consensus about phlogiston theory being the best explanation to explain processes like combustion and oxidation.
Yes, there are other factors, but 'sexy' covers a lot of ground, I kept it vague on purpose. In general new research is seen as more important than verifying research.
Take your example of the phlogiston theory. First you have the problem that it really predated the scientific method, so add even more politics than usual. If you produced a study back then confirming the phlogiston theory, it's going to be 'too boring' to try to replicate all that often. You come with with a study that discredits phlogiston, it's much more sexy to attack or confirm it, thus my statement about 'mainstream theory'. You'd have dozens of scientific groups working to replicate your results. Or the Pope excommunicating you, depending on your political position.
Although I mostly agree with this in theory and also, in theory, people should never be on the interstate if you go this direction then you better make sure your "is this an animal or a person" algorithm is rock solid.
1. If there's 1 person in the road there may be more people on the sides of the road. 2. A rolling car at highway speeds can smash LOTS of people on it's way down 3. Straight line stopping distances are actually shorter.
The hopeful ideal would be that a surprise human/animal will be detected quickly enough to enable the car to stop before collision. It may be a judgement call, but 'deliberately causing the car to roll' should never be the answer.
In a lot of the scenarios where the car ends up rolling, analysis from when we actually have enough data shows a surprising amount of either the animal being hit anyways or never actually having been in danger of being hit.
In short, spend the effort you'd put into 'detecting the difference between a deer and a human' into making sure the car doesn't hit stuff in the first place.
Yes, but against who? Right now I don't see such a lawsuit winning against the manufacturer because the driver is still held as responsible. The company did everything it could to prevent an accident with it's systems, it's not IT'S fault the driver fell asleep, right? If anything the plaintiff is only here because our systems brought him to a safe-ish hault rather than careening into something at full speed!;)
Personally, the sooner we have fully auto-drive cars the better.
They need to fix THEIR problem rather than keeping your money that you paid for the car and telling you not to drive it.
First, that's only for the most dangerous of defects. Second they generally DO fix the problems as fast as they can. You're acting like they're deliberately dragging their feet for these recalls.
I'll repeat: Manufacturing replacement parts takes time. Here's the typical timeline: 1. Problems start appearing and/or is discovered during review. 2. Scale & Scope of problem is analyzed and whether or not to do a recall is decided. Unlike Fight Club, they're not quite that cold anymore, mostly due to even uglier lawsuits, senate inquiries, and such. Cut's into the CEO's golf time if nothing else to have to be testifying before congress. 3. If a recall is called for, several processes start in parallel. Design teams start on a fix even as an initial recall notice is written and sent out. Said notice will state the problem, how to avoid the problem if necessary, etc... If they're lucky and it's something simple like a defective lot of spark plugs, it might tell you to simply have the dealer replace them if you haven't done it yourself yet as part of routine maintenance. They send a notice out to dealers to order more spark plugs, manufacturers to step up production a bit, etc... 4. Design teams hopefully finish their task of designing the fix quickly. If they're lucky it's simply 'replace part of defective lot X', if they're not it can be more like 'replace defective part X because they're all bad', with the problem that they have to fix the design of part X first, which means they have to test the new part in an accelerated way. Even worse if the problem is Assembly Y involving multiple parts.
5. Any extra parts necessary have to be ordered from the manufacturers. This can vary between 'make more spark plugs' to having to tool a new assembly line to churn out the necessary parts. For example, the ignition lock recall was a complex one that was vast enough to make putting together a new assembly line the 'best' choice, and even then it took months operating around the clock to churn out the hundreds of thousands of locks necessary, partially because each part was built specifically for the VIN of the vehicle it was going into so the keys still matched.
6. Don't forget training. Dealer mechanics are trained professionals, but you still need to distribute information to them regarding how to look for and fix the identified problem. One fix for the seatbelts in my truck simply involved 'remove these bolts, install new ones if no damage found', so it was pretty much cheaper to just replace all the bolts with 'better' ones than to worry about if the existing ones were still good.
7. Working with the dealers and manufacturers, a amplifying letters are sent out if necessary to let you know any updates on the progress of the recall. One I had ID'd the problem in the first letter, 2nd said a fix had been engineered, and 3rd said my dealer was ready to do it.
Expecting perfection is way too high of a standard, and I don't think it's bullshit if they're fixing the problem as fast as they can. Your forbidding them from selling new cars is punishing the wrong sections of the company.
Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
I craft a theory according to the current state of knowledge, and to verify it I do a study on X and come out with results Y, which I use to come to conclusion Z. My article is peer reviewed and published in the relevant accepted journal of science.
Did I do science? By most measures, YES.
However, only steps 1-3 were done on the actual scientific process - it's missing verification until a 3rd party comes along and repeats my study, gathering the same results within an acceptable margin of error.
The problem is that doing my own study is 'sexy', repeating somebody else's, especially when their results are within mainstream theory, isn't.
The same company that sends out millions of recall notices detailing the things that can happen if the part fails but also tells owners "Don't bring your cars in for repairs, we don't have the parts for it yet."
As I told somebody else, it's a legal thing. By TELLING you what the problem is they're no longer likely to get slapped with punitive damages in a lawsuit. Manufacturing replacement parts takes time.
Usually, buried in the recall notice is how YOU can keep yourself safe despite the defect. From 'Don't use the heater when it's hot out because part X could melt' to 'don't drive the vehicle, we'll send a tow truck when it's time'.
Not to mention that the best option for surprise wildlife is 'drive straight'. Many will reflexively attempt to turn to avoid the animal and end up rolling.
A car that doesn't need the human's 1/2 second to slam on the brakes can cut stopping distance almost in half.
That is why GM is advertising it as a more advanced form of Cruse Control... Vs. Autonomous driving. In short it is a feature to make your drive easier. but not as a way for you to just not pay attention to the road.
Problem is, the USAF has discovered that higher amounts of automation result in less attention paid when it comes to UAVs, which I'm certain will translate to the road.
BTW, *that* recall notice also informed me not to take my car in right away for it, as GM didn't even have the replacement parts in stock yet for that one!
And if they held off on telling you about the defect as soon as possible you'd be suing. It takes TIME to manufacture and ship 100k+ parts.
As for the lock cylinders, they did eventually end up replacing them by building new lock cylinders built for the VIN of the car being repaired. So there were delays because you had to have the dealer order the part for your VIN, then wait for your order in the queue because even operating 3 shifts it took time for the assembly line to chew through all the parts.
Any chance this is astroturfing for the company with the Ebola drug? The natural antibodies are a fierce competition to what is now a multi billion dollar market.
Probably not. Shaffer is probably just the mandatory idiot(relatively) to provide 'the other side' of the story.
As for a 'multi billion dollar market', not quite. It's worth a few tens of millions of dollars a year at most. Ebola, for all it's deadliness isn't very transmissive in humans and averages less than a hundred deaths a year - and only a few more infections. It's flashy and attention getting, but pretty much every major infection disease that most people survive kills more on an annual basis. Malaria reliably kills tens of thousands every year. Lots of money there in comparison.
Breaking down his arguments: labor-intensive: Due to the small number of patients and Africa's poor wealth, labor intensive isn't as big of a deal-breaker as it would be in the USA. They typically have labor, just not much else. 'difficult to serve a large number of patients' - Well, it's a good thing that not a lot of people catch it, right? 'suitable donors' - given survival rates, a very valid concern, but if you can get the death rate down it becomes much easier. Especially if you can get a native doctor or three who have been infected and recovered. Continued exposure will maintain immune response. 'Malnutrition and other health concerns' - Like said elsewhere, it's not like you have much choice. Just make sure you feed your surviving patient X properly so they can donate blood on schedule. 'When are they healthy enough to donate blood' - I'd go with 'When their doctor says so'.
Research shows that they're selling the cameras for $400-800 depending on options, with the more expensive types being built into the safety glasses many police wear.
But if you figure in buying accessories and spares, 'rounding up' to $1k per doesn't seem odd at all, especially if you're buying storage and not including it in 'IT costs' as a continuing expense.
As for 'fully functional', you can't get one for $100 when required functions include:
1. Must operate continuously for 8+ hours on a single charge and storage device. If you can't meet this it means that the officer might need to trade out during his lunch break and that means you need TWO per officer. 2. Must be waterproof to ~30 meters - Rain, officer needs to go into the water for some reason. I say 30 because I'm used to adding a zero to the 'max anticipated depth' to make sure that it's good even at the lower depth. 3. Must be shockproof against being dropped/slammed into pavement - officer is hitting the ground taking cover or happens to hit it while putting down/fighting a suspect. 4. Must be light weight - cops already carry lots of stuff, a 5 pound unit isn't going to cut it. One of the reasons we're only seeing body cameras now, years after seeing them in cruisers. 5. Must have a high enough resolution to be useful 6. Must work even in dimly lit locations 'well enough'. etc....
Get a big enough police department and you can expect incidents.
Let's say you have a murder rate of 1 in 100k people. Pretty good. A village of 1k people should expect 1 murder every 100 years. A city of 10M will be averaging a murder almost every 3 days.
You're just as likely to be murdered in either area; but which will be known for murder?
In no way perfect and simplified for argument sake, but im sure software could be written to handle it
It can, but then the question becomes - how much can the automated tools cut safely? I imagine that a police body camera is going to always have a fair bit of motion associated with it. If they're standing around they're generally talking. Even slight shifts of the body can present lots of motion to the camera, etc...
I'm not saying that it can't be done, but it'd be complex programmatically and couldn't cut as much as a live review because you'd need to keep the parameters loose to avoid false negatives.
You can, but how long before the gun shots do you record? Personally, I think 1 gunshot should be enough to more or less permanently archive the whole day, same with any 'serious' incident.
But yeah, after 90 days or so, go through and kill off meaningless portions of the video, but I figure that any automated tools are going to have to be set fairly loose, leaving lots of irrelevant stuff in there in order to make sure to keep the relevant stuff. Having watched some police video, they're nearly always in a fairly noisy environment - both audibly and visibly.
That still requires somebody to review all the daily tapes and purge non-interaction times, and you don't want the officers doing it themselves. Even if you have a guy doing it mostly on fast forward, that's 1 reviewer for every 10 cops or so.
It'd probably be cheaper to just store everything, and no, I don't think 30 days is anywhere near enough given how long it can take to generate a court case and have the records subpoenaed. I'd consider 90 days the bare minimum.
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That's why I have a personal policy of always costing them more money than they seize from me. You confiscated $400 from me? I'm going to arrange to use more than $400 in police resources. I will mail you enough letters that you'll spend more than $400 just responding to them. I'll sue in small claims court so you have to send a representative to get it tossed out, then hire a lawyer to send fancy letters forcing the department to hire another fancy lawyer to send responses back.
Publishing is the first step of the peer review process.
Actually, I'd say writing the paper is step 1,
Step 2 is the paper being accepted by the journal, where it is then sent out to peers for review
Step 3 is the peer review, if it passes -
Step 4 is final editing and publication
With numbers like that, the batteries don't sound all that expensive. How many batteries you would need per bus depends on a number of factors. Charge time is a big one.
Well, a quick search shows 260-360 horsepower for buses. An 85 kwh Model S is 362 hp. Now, I know that HP is far from the only factor, torque is as well, which is why buses and other large industrial vehicles tend towards massive diesel engines rather than fairly small gasoline engines that produce more 'power' on paper by the horsepower spec.
Mainly because the smaller engine will tear itself to pieces in short order if asked to do the duty cycle of the bigger engine. Still, electric motors are notoriously tough, but to my thinking a model S drivetrain would be an excellent stand-in as being for hybrid components for a bus.
Now, a Model S manages 265 miles off it's battery with a vehicle that's extremely aerodynamic and only weighing 4,647.3 lbs*.
Meanwhile a bus isn't aerodynamic, and I'm seeing 22, 28, and even 40k pounds.
That gives me electric ranges of 56, 44, and 31 miles of range per 85kwh battery pack, if you figure that lower average speeds allows the battery pack to mostly scale linearly. I'm also seeing 4 mpg for a bus - which would translate to 24 mpg for the model S of you compare the 28k pound 44 mile and multiply by the divider, so it sounds about right.
In addition we know that the wheelbase on a Model S is 116" and that the battery fits between the wheels. So a 45' bus should be able to fit at least 4 of them, assuming that with a width of up to 102" you couldn't fit the batteries in sideways.
That's without figuring on stuff like stacking the batteries on top of each other. My conclusion is that there isn't any need for roof mounting, removable seats, or even trailers for extra battery storage. If you want to save the battery weight, simply unmount them and leave the packs back at the station.
*I'll note that for a car the model S is actually pretty heavy, but we're comparing it to a bus here.
I think it's funny that you didn't consider the casualties as a negative as well. ;)
Super-capacitors don't currently have a price advantage over batteries for these uses - not enough range off them even if they can provide the necessary power.
This made me curious, so I found a citation.
They're blaming emissions standards that cost fuel. Personally, I have a hard time with systems that burn more fuel for 'less emissions'. There should be ways to do both, but from doing my research as I was considering a diesel vehicle, there's a LOT of angst over this right now because they killed a lot of diesel's mileage advantage with the new emissions standards. There's even forum posts out there on how to re-tune engines 'the old way' to get the mileage back.
A electrically powered bus with overhead wires _and_ a battery could go down every road, more or less.
A hybrid system is a good idea, but in 'most' cases would be used where the overhead wires already exist due to the capital costs being sunk.
As such, putting a battery into them is a good way to extend the range of your electric buses beyond the wiring, but I tend to picture it like a heat map. Depending on the size of the battery you put in, it's only a 'temporary' fix if the city keeps expanding.
1. Battery Swap stations. If you think the driver would need to 'hop out' you should check out Tesla's swap video. However, the problem here is capital in nature - you have to build the station(s) and populate them with batteries. Going with a Tesla model S 85 kwh battery gives us a very conservative $22k per battery - you'd get less range powering a bus than an efficient car, and currently Tesla is paying the least per kwh of any EV manufacturer. Going with a relatively small time bus maker? The battery will almost certainly be more expensive.
2. Battery Trailer: Some of these buses are already long enough, and another set of axles adds complexity to an already extra-long vehicle.
As one of the ACs mentioned, the wires are 'ugly'. The other problem is that running a wire power network that meets today's safety requirements is expensive, thus only good in areas toeing the line of where subways and such would be logical.
It's also a question of flexibility. Sure, the bus doesn't need to go down every road, but they more or less can, providing flexibility. If it'd cost a few million to install new lines to provide electricity to the buses, they're less likely to change/extend the routes.
With batteries becoming so much better, it's actually a good question as to whether they're cheaper today than the power lines.
I would hope that a computerized car that swerved or pulled over would make sure to at least hit less obstructions than the original obstruction.
Well yes. But the scenario I was picturing was for the typical wildlife strike - dark highway with foliage on the sides and an animal/person that you don't know what it's going to do. Swerving into oncoming traffic would be bad, you might not have enough margin on the side to dodge that way.
This is a valid point if it is truly quicker to stop than it is to change lanes. I kindof doubt that is the case at highway speeds though.
I agree, it's something for the programmers to simulate and test. You need a lane to change into though.
One should realize that there might not be that many loaner cars available, and better than 99% of the time the car remains usable with a caveat.
But yes, it's the classy thing to do if you declare that the vehicle is unfit to drive(we'll send a tow truck) due to the problem causing the recall.
There are other factors as well. There used to be a broad scientific consensus about phlogiston theory being the best explanation to explain processes like combustion and oxidation.
Yes, there are other factors, but 'sexy' covers a lot of ground, I kept it vague on purpose. In general new research is seen as more important than verifying research.
Take your example of the phlogiston theory. First you have the problem that it really predated the scientific method, so add even more politics than usual. If you produced a study back then confirming the phlogiston theory, it's going to be 'too boring' to try to replicate all that often. You come with with a study that discredits phlogiston, it's much more sexy to attack or confirm it, thus my statement about 'mainstream theory'. You'd have dozens of scientific groups working to replicate your results. Or the Pope excommunicating you, depending on your political position.
Although I mostly agree with this in theory and also, in theory, people should never be on the interstate if you go this direction then
you better make sure your "is this an animal or a person" algorithm is rock solid.
1. If there's 1 person in the road there may be more people on the sides of the road.
2. A rolling car at highway speeds can smash LOTS of people on it's way down
3. Straight line stopping distances are actually shorter.
The hopeful ideal would be that a surprise human/animal will be detected quickly enough to enable the car to stop before collision. It may be a judgement call, but 'deliberately causing the car to roll' should never be the answer.
In a lot of the scenarios where the car ends up rolling, analysis from when we actually have enough data shows a surprising amount of either the animal being hit anyways or never actually having been in danger of being hit.
In short, spend the effort you'd put into 'detecting the difference between a deer and a human' into making sure the car doesn't hit stuff in the first place.
Yes, but against who? Right now I don't see such a lawsuit winning against the manufacturer because the driver is still held as responsible. The company did everything it could to prevent an accident with it's systems, it's not IT'S fault the driver fell asleep, right? If anything the plaintiff is only here because our systems brought him to a safe-ish hault rather than careening into something at full speed! ;)
Personally, the sooner we have fully auto-drive cars the better.
They need to fix THEIR problem rather than keeping your money that you paid for the car and telling you not to drive it.
First, that's only for the most dangerous of defects. Second they generally DO fix the problems as fast as they can. You're acting like they're deliberately dragging their feet for these recalls.
I'll repeat: Manufacturing replacement parts takes time. Here's the typical timeline:
1. Problems start appearing and/or is discovered during review.
2. Scale & Scope of problem is analyzed and whether or not to do a recall is decided. Unlike Fight Club, they're not quite that cold anymore, mostly due to even uglier lawsuits, senate inquiries, and such. Cut's into the CEO's golf time if nothing else to have to be testifying before congress.
3. If a recall is called for, several processes start in parallel. Design teams start on a fix even as an initial recall notice is written and sent out. Said notice will state the problem, how to avoid the problem if necessary, etc... If they're lucky and it's something simple like a defective lot of spark plugs, it might tell you to simply have the dealer replace them if you haven't done it yourself yet as part of routine maintenance. They send a notice out to dealers to order more spark plugs, manufacturers to step up production a bit, etc...
4. Design teams hopefully finish their task of designing the fix quickly. If they're lucky it's simply 'replace part of defective lot X', if they're not it can be more like 'replace defective part X because they're all bad', with the problem that they have to fix the design of part X first, which means they have to test the new part in an accelerated way. Even worse if the problem is Assembly Y involving multiple parts.
5. Any extra parts necessary have to be ordered from the manufacturers. This can vary between 'make more spark plugs' to having to tool a new assembly line to churn out the necessary parts. For example, the ignition lock recall was a complex one that was vast enough to make putting together a new assembly line the 'best' choice, and even then it took months operating around the clock to churn out the hundreds of thousands of locks necessary, partially because each part was built specifically for the VIN of the vehicle it was going into so the keys still matched.
6. Don't forget training. Dealer mechanics are trained professionals, but you still need to distribute information to them regarding how to look for and fix the identified problem. One fix for the seatbelts in my truck simply involved 'remove these bolts, install new ones if no damage found', so it was pretty much cheaper to just replace all the bolts with 'better' ones than to worry about if the existing ones were still good.
7. Working with the dealers and manufacturers, a amplifying letters are sent out if necessary to let you know any updates on the progress of the recall. One I had ID'd the problem in the first letter, 2nd said a fix had been engineered, and 3rd said my dealer was ready to do it.
Expecting perfection is way too high of a standard, and I don't think it's bullshit if they're fixing the problem as fast as they can. Your forbidding them from selling new cars is punishing the wrong sections of the company.
Science is verifiable and reproducible often in a variety of ways, or it is not "science."
I craft a theory according to the current state of knowledge, and to verify it I do a study on X and come out with results Y, which I use to come to conclusion Z. My article is peer reviewed and published in the relevant accepted journal of science.
Did I do science? By most measures, YES.
However, only steps 1-3 were done on the actual scientific process - it's missing verification until a 3rd party comes along and repeats my study, gathering the same results within an acceptable margin of error.
The problem is that doing my own study is 'sexy', repeating somebody else's, especially when their results are within mainstream theory, isn't.
The same company that sends out millions of recall notices detailing the things that can happen if the part fails but also tells owners "Don't bring your cars in for repairs, we don't have the parts for it yet."
As I told somebody else, it's a legal thing. By TELLING you what the problem is they're no longer likely to get slapped with punitive damages in a lawsuit. Manufacturing replacement parts takes time.
Usually, buried in the recall notice is how YOU can keep yourself safe despite the defect. From 'Don't use the heater when it's hot out because part X could melt' to 'don't drive the vehicle, we'll send a tow truck when it's time'.
Not to mention that the best option for surprise wildlife is 'drive straight'. Many will reflexively attempt to turn to avoid the animal and end up rolling.
A car that doesn't need the human's 1/2 second to slam on the brakes can cut stopping distance almost in half.
That is why GM is advertising it as a more advanced form of Cruse Control... Vs. Autonomous driving. In short it is a feature to make your drive easier. but not as a way for you to just not pay attention to the road.
Problem is, the USAF has discovered that higher amounts of automation result in less attention paid when it comes to UAVs, which I'm certain will translate to the road.
BTW, *that* recall notice also informed me not to take my car in right away for it, as GM didn't even have the replacement parts in stock yet for that one!
And if they held off on telling you about the defect as soon as possible you'd be suing. It takes TIME to manufacture and ship 100k+ parts.
As for the lock cylinders, they did eventually end up replacing them by building new lock cylinders built for the VIN of the car being repaired. So there were delays because you had to have the dealer order the part for your VIN, then wait for your order in the queue because even operating 3 shifts it took time for the assembly line to chew through all the parts.
Any chance this is astroturfing for the company with the Ebola drug? The natural antibodies are a fierce competition to what is now a multi billion dollar market.
Probably not. Shaffer is probably just the mandatory idiot(relatively) to provide 'the other side' of the story.
As for a 'multi billion dollar market', not quite. It's worth a few tens of millions of dollars a year at most. Ebola, for all it's deadliness isn't very transmissive in humans and averages less than a hundred deaths a year - and only a few more infections. It's flashy and attention getting, but pretty much every major infection disease that most people survive kills more on an annual basis. Malaria reliably kills tens of thousands every year. Lots of money there in comparison.
Breaking down his arguments:
labor-intensive: Due to the small number of patients and Africa's poor wealth, labor intensive isn't as big of a deal-breaker as it would be in the USA. They typically have labor, just not much else.
'difficult to serve a large number of patients' - Well, it's a good thing that not a lot of people catch it, right?
'suitable donors' - given survival rates, a very valid concern, but if you can get the death rate down it becomes much easier. Especially if you can get a native doctor or three who have been infected and recovered. Continued exposure will maintain immune response.
'Malnutrition and other health concerns' - Like said elsewhere, it's not like you have much choice. Just make sure you feed your surviving patient X properly so they can donate blood on schedule.
'When are they healthy enough to donate blood' - I'd go with 'When their doctor says so'.
Research shows that they're selling the cameras for $400-800 depending on options, with the more expensive types being built into the safety glasses many police wear.
But if you figure in buying accessories and spares, 'rounding up' to $1k per doesn't seem odd at all, especially if you're buying storage and not including it in 'IT costs' as a continuing expense.
As for 'fully functional', you can't get one for $100 when required functions include:
1. Must operate continuously for 8+ hours on a single charge and storage device. If you can't meet this it means that the officer might need to trade out during his lunch break and that means you need TWO per officer.
2. Must be waterproof to ~30 meters - Rain, officer needs to go into the water for some reason. I say 30 because I'm used to adding a zero to the 'max anticipated depth' to make sure that it's good even at the lower depth.
3. Must be shockproof against being dropped/slammed into pavement - officer is hitting the ground taking cover or happens to hit it while putting down/fighting a suspect.
4. Must be light weight - cops already carry lots of stuff, a 5 pound unit isn't going to cut it. One of the reasons we're only seeing body cameras now, years after seeing them in cruisers.
5. Must have a high enough resolution to be useful
6. Must work even in dimly lit locations 'well enough'.
etc....
Get a big enough police department and you can expect incidents.
Let's say you have a murder rate of 1 in 100k people. Pretty good. A village of 1k people should expect 1 murder every 100 years. A city of 10M will be averaging a murder almost every 3 days.
You're just as likely to be murdered in either area; but which will be known for murder?
In no way perfect and simplified for argument sake, but im sure software could be written to handle it
It can, but then the question becomes - how much can the automated tools cut safely? I imagine that a police body camera is going to always have a fair bit of motion associated with it. If they're standing around they're generally talking. Even slight shifts of the body can present lots of motion to the camera, etc...
I'm not saying that it can't be done, but it'd be complex programmatically and couldn't cut as much as a live review because you'd need to keep the parameters loose to avoid false negatives.
You can, but how long before the gun shots do you record? Personally, I think 1 gunshot should be enough to more or less permanently archive the whole day, same with any 'serious' incident.
But yeah, after 90 days or so, go through and kill off meaningless portions of the video, but I figure that any automated tools are going to have to be set fairly loose, leaving lots of irrelevant stuff in there in order to make sure to keep the relevant stuff. Having watched some police video, they're nearly always in a fairly noisy environment - both audibly and visibly.
Actually, reports from Canada is that cameras DO reduce the number of offenses, reducing assaults both on and by officers.
With the cameras you have a better chance of catching said burned out people before they're pulling the trigger of their firearm...
*They'll need a few spares to replace those lost, stolen, or destroyed beyond warranty repair/replacement.
That still requires somebody to review all the daily tapes and purge non-interaction times, and you don't want the officers doing it themselves. Even if you have a guy doing it mostly on fast forward, that's 1 reviewer for every 10 cops or so.
It'd probably be cheaper to just store everything, and no, I don't think 30 days is anywhere near enough given how long it can take to generate a court case and have the records subpoenaed. I'd consider 90 days the bare minimum.