The theory goes something like: a detailled enough map could indicate which intersections DO have a traffic light. If the car doesn't see neither a green light nor a red, but map indicates there should be one, the car should be able to know that it has missed a traffic light and slow down and safely ask to hand control back to the human in time.
(It's NOT entirely possible. There are database like SCDB.info that counts all known speed- / redlight- traps. Knowing that some European Cities put a dual function speed+redlight trap at nearly all crossings, that basically amounts to have a database of traffic light in those cities).
In practice, Google Cars engineer have found at that maps would need to be excurciatingly detailled. And need to be kept up to date on a very fast schedule. (There might be construction, etc. changing the layout of some crossing an thus traffic lights position, etc.) Which mandates to constantly rescan the streets. Which would suggest that equipping all the fleet of cars with detector to see such change.
At which point, you realise that a car able to map out the change in traffic light......could instead directly see the traffic lights themselves. Once you've solved the problem of seeing reliably enough traffic lights in order to accurately update the map, you don't need the ultra-accurate map anymore.
So no. GPS assistance *might* seem a great idea, but actually not.
but my backing camera gets crapped up a lot more easily than my mirrors do.
Of course. You backing camera is usually situated at the back of the car where it is exposed to lots of mud and dust projections. Whereas your rear-view mirror is usually *INSIDE* the car. Of course one is going to get dirty faster than the other.
Whereas for side mirror...
And any likely camera location on the vehicle is likely to get covered with snow more quickly and thoroughly than my side mirrors do.
...in my experience: No.
The side mirrors have a thin rim at the bottom (the must be orientable, so there's always a small rim), and snow DOES accumulate here (though for the record, most north-european brand will heat the mirror in cold weather to avoid fog build-up, but this can also quickly melt any accumulated snow).
Where as the side cameras (used for automatic detection of vehicles in the blind spots) a pointing a little bit downward and thus don't offer a surface where snow can accumulate. (In theory, a long period of freezing and melting could slowly bulid an ice stalactite obscuring the view of the camera. In practice they're heated to anyway, again to avoid fog build up, but that would detach any ice stalactite too).
Except for the blind spots. {...} Sideview cameras will likely have similar advantages.
A driver will only occasionally turn their head to watch blind spots. They might forget.
Whereas systems like BLIS can be constantly watching the road and blink a light nearby the mirror alerting the driver of the presence of a vehicle in the blind spot. Combine it with sideway pointing sonars and you're almost sure that no driver is every going to accidentally cut somebody up.
Yeah because regular non-electronic mirrors never ever get broken, at all!!! They are all made of iPhone 8-grade gorilla glass, feature a mithril reflective coating and are encased in adamantium.
I suffered more frequently from mirror broken by anonymous dip-shit while leaving my vehicle parked somewhere (when they aren't straigh breaking the whole car), than I've suffered electronics failure since I've started driving cars with cameras on them.
(And that's ignoring the fact that some cars feature a very nice rear camera view, while the back window is absolutely tiny and thus the rear view mirror is useless).
Retractable side mirrors are really a saver on recent cars.
Replacing them with cameras is: - one protruding item less that will get destroyed. - less obstacles that interrupt the aerodynamic shape of the car.
Sometimes it is a good idea to test this stuff out before jumping into conclusions on why it may be a bad idea.
And sometimes, it's good to make just some ballpark guesstimate before jumping into the first "freaking" meme-filled kickstarter project.
And regarding the Solar Roads, there's simply no way that the numbers could add up.
So either:
A. - The creators actually have a few big not-yet announced technological surprises up their sleeves that they'll releave as a last minute surprise (which isn't entirely impossible: there's a lot of research being done on solar pannels' efficiency, LEDs efficiency, etc.) And that would explain why the estimets under estimate the project.
B. - The ceators are way over-optimistic and are hoping too much. The estimation are right and the project will only work for a very limited definition of work (like the tile barely able to power themselves. Not replacing all the coal power plants and powering thousands of home).
Given how much hype-driven this campaign looks like, I might be, there's a high chance that we're witnessing "B".
Climate science has been tested and proven over and over again using numerous different methods, which all broadly lead to more or less the same ballpark of conclusion. The only actually *REAL* controversy that exist among scientific is about the minute details of interpretation (like the exact expected decimals at the end of the predicted number), not about the broad existence of climate change.
From this perspective it's quite normal to have strong scepticism against pseudo-scientist trying to stir controversies around climate change without bringing any new data to the table.
OTOH
fMRI is a rather noisy and low resolution recent method.
Some results have been confirmed multiple time using large studies, and comparing to numerous other methods (like study of brain-accident victims, like tests done in parallel during brain-cancer surgery, like information learned from neuro-anatomy, etc.)
Other information really come from a couple of small studies with very few samples, that aren't replicated yet, nor confirmed by any other methodology. It might be too early to shout "Brain region responsible fro 'XyZ' found !!!!"
Is that the software ecosystem for this is so small that it seems to affect across many MRI vendors.
Nope. It's that the vendor only takes care to write the bit of software that actually controls the MRI machine. The vendor takes care of the low-level and behind the scene work need to they point where you obtain an image - usually in a standard format like DICOM. (think about the firmware inside a digital point and shoot camera, which is in charge of controlling the CCD, the flash and the zoom/focus, and whose purpose is to write a JPEG file on the storage media at the end).
Whatever you do with the DICOM out of the machine is up to you. A doctor could display it using some viewing software to make some clinical conclusion. It could be stored in archives to be referenced later to see the progression of some condition. Or you could try to do some stats on it. (to keep the photography metaphore: you're free to just look to your JPEG, or store it on your Drop Box/Google Drive/iCloud/the Fappen... oops. Or run it through GIMP, or even import it into Blender as texture for some even more elaborate artwork).
There are a lot of viewer software both opensource (Osirix, Aeskulap) and closed source (sometime even provided as part of a deal with the manufacturer of the MRI).
Because the market is much smaller, and because research need to pool their efforts together, there are fewer imaging research software pipelines. Most of them are usually opensource and organized around specific project of some universities. (e.g.: the BrainVisa pipeline, FreeSurfer, etc.) which tend to reuse similar building blocks in their pipelines (FSL is used around a lot).
The claim is quite dubious in that it seems to suggest that scientists know someone is going to move their arm before the person does, simply from reading MRI images.
Not MRI image. But fMRI images (where f = "functional") In a nutshell, those image are based around the fact that hemoglobin loaded with oxygen interacts and distorts the magnetic field differently than hemoglobin which has discarded its oxygen. By measure these signal differences, it's possible to infer where there's more oxygen consumption, and from there try to guess which parts of the brain are working more (and thus consuming more oxygen).
Spatial resolution of such image is "not so great" (blurier thant the brain anatomy visible on the brain itself), but still acceptable. Reach is very good (you can see the whole inside of the skull). Signal strength is very weak (very subtle variation, meaning lot's of noise). Temporal resolution is very poor (to begin with all MRI images take a lot of time to take, and then there's the problem is that you're not measuring brain activity directly, but you're inferring it from its indirect effect on the local blood flow). Still it's a useful tool under some circumstances.
Compare it with other tools, like measuring electric (EEG) or magnetic activity from ther outside: Spatial resolution is absolutely shitty (you must infer what's happening from a few points scattered across the surface of the scalp) Reach isn't deep at all (you mostly see what's happening on the surface. Deep brain structures are too deep to be visible). Temporal resolution is amazing (you can measure the direct electrical output ms after ms)
The best tool it still open-skull surgeries (using electrodes directly on the brain to measure activities or to very precisely stimulate some area), but they are a rare commodity (= you can only find volunteers to enroll into your studies among people getting brain surgery to remove tumors). The second best tool is the clinical description of psychiatric damage experienced by people who where victim of accident where their brain was damaged.
EEG and fMRI are coarser tools, but much easier to setup.
In addition to that anatomists and histologist have had tons of other tools to explore the anatomy and connections of the brain. (regular MRI, dissections of cadavers, study of some virus which climb along the nerves, some freezing-/cracking- based special technique of dissection, some special type of diffusion-MRI, etc. )
I find that hard to believe except possibly in some limited cases.
The whole central nervous system works in stage, from very low level (nerves controlling muscles or nerves fed by receptors) all the way to high-level (processing complex information).
Most of the low-level (i.e.: most of the body, except the eyes, ears and a few other head organs) is connected to a region in the mid of the brain, roughly around where the head band of your headphone goes. Except for a few preprocessing done in the spine (or in the upper layers of the retina in eyes) the signal is very close to raw (1 point of connection = 1 information about a small group of receptor. Like an edge).
Everything behind this "headband" handle signal input and perception. And the more you get away to the point where nervous tracts connects to the cortex, the more integration and convolution is done with the signal (from edges to shapes to objects like "face recognition") and combination with other signals (associative region, which aren't specific to a single sense and can't be pinpointed down to a precise simple role).
Everything in front of this "headband" handle the signal output and motor control. It has the same overall organisation: the more you move to the front away from the "headband", the more the processing is "high-level" and "multimodal" and handles high level functi
Is to possible to manually decide when the vehicle changes speed, like on a manual gearbox?
Well, normally I change speed using the accelerator (errr, "gas pedal") and brake - I suspect you mean changing gear selection, rather than changing speed.
Ooops, sorry. My bad. English isn't my first language, and some of the laguage I speak tend to use the same word for both concept.
As long as the vehicle has actual gears (i.e.: a car with an internal combustion engine) the car will have, in addition to the fully automatic mode ("D" on the gear shift) also have a "sequential gearbox"-mode ("+" and "-" on the gear shift).
'D' for drive ; 'P' for park ; '1' for ultra-low speed (pedestrian-designated areas), '2' for low speed (traffic jams), and 'R' for reversing, as I recall. I don't recall ever seeing a "+" or "-" on the mode selector.
Whoa! I haven't seen "1" and "2" in ages... (And I change frequently cars as I mostly drive them from car-sharing)
1 & 2 are an older simpler and coarser concept: - instead of the transmission being fully automatic (like in "D") and choosing any possible gear ratio from the list - 1 and 2 are restricted: they're still automatic but limit the transmission to only a smaller subset of the list of gear ratios.
Nearly any modern non-electric car that I've driven recently has the sequential type of control that I've described before: - either + or - sign that you tap on the sides of the "D" mode - or a separate "M" mode that has + and - above and below it
With that, you manually ask the automatic transmission to force gear up and down.
Oh, hang on, I'm not sure if that was an IC engine or an electric - I didn't have any reason to ask.
Usually electric cars won't have old-style 1 and 2 or new-style + and -. Because they only have one single gear ratio and just spin the motor faster or slower without problems. (In fact even "D" and "R" are purely software. No gears are shifted, only a different pattern is sent to the electro-magnets so the rotor spins in the other direction)
The closest thing I've seen to a mode is an "eco" button sitting nearby the selector that will limit the power consumption of the motor (It will never eat more than xx kW, unless you floor the accelerator pedal) which make it accelerate slower and might limit the top speed, but vastly increase the range.
You've got to press a button on the side of the mode selector before you can change modes - "tapping" it anywhere is prevented by an interlock in the selector. I remember having to figure that out first time I found myself with the keys to an automatic.
So more recent cars have a special mode (either D or M) where tapping is not prevented, but actually signals your wish that the automatic transmission changes gear. (When in the corresponding mode, the selector isn't firmly locked in place, but some wiggling is allowed to convey such commands)
Most more modern cars I've seen tend to have the button not on the side, but so placed (under the forward facing part) that you'll automatically press it when you grasp firmly the selector.
(Also, the mode selector is where a normal gear selector is - not on the steering column, as I see in the movies.
I've never seen a steering-column selector. (Except for specially adapted cars for disabled people, or some weird construction machines) Which movie do you refer to ?
Or do you refer to the letters display on the dashboard itself ?
The machines don't seem to know when to drop down a gear in order to increase engine revs and power. Totally gutless response in consequence.
More modern car might react if you press the accelerator pedal more firmly and automatically drop gear and rev up to give you more power. The auto cruise
The other options are only more "efficient" if you place no value on your time or personal convenience. You might choose to spend an hour on public transportation instead of a 30 minute drive to save $10, but I would usually not.
In several European cities, the situations is actually reversed:
- They are over crowded. Unless you want to get around at unusual hours, there is going to be traffic jams everywhere.
- Public transportation is usually circulating separately and isn't affected by jams (city trams and bus might just have separate lanes. Or the metro trafic is completely underground in cities that have them).
- Long distance train have high speed. Car speeds on highway are usually limited to 120 or 130km/h depending on the countries (...but not in Germany. Only local segments are limited, there's no general limitation), whereas the train usually drive at 150~180km/h (or higher depending on the local type of high-speed trains).
So depending on your destination, public transportation *might* actually get you there faster. (and much safer) But on the other hand it costs a bit.
Same also for short in-city trips by bike:
- Lots of European cities have separate bike-lanes. (and in lots of jurisdiction, when there's no bike lane, bikes are supposed to form separate lines) So bicycles aren't affect by traffic jams
- Altought a car's *top* speed (=the speed limitation in the street) is higher than a bicycle's, a bicycle's *avarage* speed ( = still close to the top speed) is higher than the speed of a car stuck in a traffic jam.
So, in summary, in several european big cities, not taking the car it the thing that actually saves you time. (Or, alternatively, managing to have a work where you can shop up and go home outside of rush hours).
Is it possible to drive an automatic like a manual gearbox?
What do you mean? Is to possible to manually decide when the vehicle changes speed, like on a manual gearbox?
Yes. As long as the vehicle has actual gears (i.e.: a car with an internal combustion engine) the car will have, in addition to the fully automatic mode ("D" on the gear shift) also have a "sequential gearbox"-mode ("+" and "-" on the gear shift). Depending on the model, you either tap the stick side ways, or you move the stick to a different position (sometimes called "M") and tap up and down. This way, your manually control when the gearbox moves to a higher or lower speed. Depending on your driving style, that might come handy when driving in the mountain.
But the car usually prevents you from destroying it. You can't accelerate to 100km/h while still in 1st gear, the system will shift gear to prevent you from staying too long in over-rev.
On the other hand, this option doesn't exist on vehicle that don't have actual gears (obviously):
There's no similar options on motor scooter which tend to use continuously variable transmission instead of discreet gears. (i.e.: there isn't a list of fixed of gear ratio that you select from with a stick, the ratio is a continuously changing real number depending on the speed)
There's no similar options on electric vehicle, they don't shift gear, they just spin their motors faster or slower. (there's only one fixed ratio ever. But the electric motor itself is always working best no matter its RPMs)
You also have an inborn reflex to brace for impact. A kid see the big thing in front, and a kid know automatically to hold on thing.
Which, while growing up, have also adapted to brace for the incoming quick braking.A growing kid/teen see the big thing in front and know to hold on things, because the braking will send thing flying around. MAIN POINT: You'll see the behaviour even in non-driving individuals ("non drivers" might sound bizarre to the average USian, but assure you that on the other side of the atlantic pond, we have plenty of them in continental europe where the public transportation is good enough).
Then once you start learning to drive, you built the instinct to throw your right foot on the braking pedal to save your life (if the anti-collision system of the car isn't already doing that for you).
So the sore braking foot is a combination of all of the above: - you wanting to break inconsciously. - but also your instinct trying to save you from imminent impact/avoid flying around on braking. it just that, by now, due to the previous mechanism you tend to preferably throw forward your braking foot. (instead of say, holding both feet while grasping the hand grab)
My camera knows when it's missing details such as the edge of the "white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky". When the histogram clips either to the left or the right, a self-driving car should determine whether each blank area of the image is big enough to conceal a hazard (unlike glare on a piece of chrome, for example),
Yup, that's a possible strategy, that apparently wasn't added to the software yet. On the other hand, I will only react in badly lit condition (white vehicle in an over-lit scene / black vehicle in an underlit scene), it won't necessarily react correctly in case of fog (everything is washed out even the mid-range) or snow (the scene is just a huge cluster fuck of motion noise).
But yeah definitely extra strategies need to be added. And I stand by my previous comment, an extra "sense" must be added for this specific range (like a lidar)
and if so, slow down and be prepared to stop.
- a car (not necessarily Autopilot, even simpler tech like collision avoidance is *always* ready to break).
- you've successfully demonstrated that the car can determine that it can't see a region, what should it be "ready for" if it can't see there ?
- the correct course of action (like with humans and with simpler collision avoidance) would be to adapt the speed/braking to the visibility range. i.e.: if Autopilot determins that there's a zone it can't distinguish 50m a head, it should automatically slow down to speed where the braking range is shorter like 40m. So if suddenly an object "pops out" of the visibility range and is suddenly seen to pose a collision risk, the car can break in time.
- the car should also have a clear protocole to hand control back to the human. I.e.: if visibility goes bonkers, to start slowing down quickly while sounding an alarm asking the human driver to pay attention to the road instead to the movie.
Speaking of which...
WHAT THE HELL ?!?!?
You're driving an experimental technology, and you're absorbed by a movie ?
I you want to completely forget about the road and look a movie, there are vehicle better adapted to that: it's called "public transportation", we have plenty of it here around on the European continent...
Or you know, simply being a passenger on the ride, e.g.: car pooling... Driving *alone* in a vehicle isn't terribly efficient (although in this case it's a Tesla which has been proved to be a little bit better to the environment, even if you factor in the construction of the vehicle and the production of the energy). It's always better to share the ride, and if the passanger also knows to drive, that's an extra eye (a third one in addition to the human driver and to Autopilot).
I usually travel in this configuration when on vacation road trip: parents' Volvo got a collision avoidance system, I am the driver, and my passenger knows enough to whatch the road too, while the rest of the team parties hard on the back seat...
Got a solution to the above? Let me answer for you - no you dont.
- One already possible solution is to have the first truck in a convoy being still maned (a la Tesla: autopilot but with human supervisor) and the human can still be in charge of the whole convoy if anything happens.
- Other possible solution would be to subcontracts handling of such problems to 3rd party companies operated by actual humans. If the robotruck notice anything bizare, it can summon an operator to come check at it.
- More sensors, more redundancy, higher level of controls. such robotruck could detect anomalies very early and could automatically ask for a check at the next station they stop by. or could still operate with one blown tire until the next station.
Autonomus trucks are a bigger fucking pipedream than autonomous cars - it isnt going to happen fo 30 years at least.
Meanwhile, high speed european trains have seen lots of automation happen. It's a different use case (e.g.: trains don't have tires that can blow up), but it still an example of a serious commercial application where the necessary staff has progressively shrunk.
There are strong advantages and economic incentives for robotruck, so it is bound to happen.
Imagine a truck on a roadway, going from one loading dock to another, as an elevator car, or a "people-mover" style unmanned train.
Some countries (hello switzerland) have already replaced huge portions of the trucks traffic with actual trains. (Well manned train. With an operator paying close attention if anything goes wrong with the semi-automated high-speed train)
The cause, speculated by the blogger, was that "As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview.", which sounds less like it's less about performance and more about discouragement, lack of self-confidence, and other factors.
As a side-note (a very *side*-note): It's also my experience in sports.
When I'm not stuck in front of a keyboard doing biomedical research, my hobby is outdoor sports, more precisely ski (Yay, European Alps !) and I regularily exercice this hobby of mine as a ski teacher. (Mind you: Not that seriously. It's just a hobby, not a profession to bring the dough)
As part our training as teachers we periodically need to give lessons to kids (the rest of the time, I teach ski at the university to adults). And there's also a tendency that I've seen: - young girls tend much more often to under-evaluate their performance, lack some self-confidence, etc.
(at this level of ski, mostly to teach them so they can have some fun, not train the future olympic team, girls aren't at a biological disadvantage. although they might put a little bit less muscle mass for a given level of training than boys (=with higher steroid hormone level), they tend to have a lower center of mass which helps a bit in sliding/disbalancing sports.) So girls aren't necessarily performing worse than the boys, but lots of them do perceive it that way, due to lack of self confidence. Except for a few individuals( who don't give a damn about pecking order or anything, and seem clearly aware of their own capabilities... (and also seem completely unaffected by all the belittling jokes that kids throw at each other during sports).
Part of the way I organise my lessons involves therefore also helping my students (both kids and adults) to realise what they manage to accomplish.
"Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied," Tesla wrote.
And if the image was so washed out that it couldn't make out the outline, then because it couldn't see clearly, the car shouldn't have been moving so fast. {...} It would also help to upgrade the camera to one with a wider dynamic range and/or more resolution so the image is less likely to get washed out again.
That or add an entirely different class of sensors. There's a reason why Volvo supplements their forward facing camera and long-range radar with a LIDAR, same with some Mercedes. Or that for their city safety (only slow speed in city collision avoidance. No lane detect) the little VW Up counts on a LIDAR instead of a camera.
A camera has the same limitations that human eyes have (and actually even worse, due to lower dynamic range and different resolution*) If you cannot see it, chances are that the camera won't be able either.
On the other hand, because they are self-illuminated, and because they return a different kind of information (depth, instead of shapes of colour) a LIDAR might cleary perceive the contour of a white object on a white background.
It has its own limitations (highly reflective / no reflective at all surfaces), but would add new useful information to supplement what is provided by the current Autopilot camera (which might miss a white-on-white object like this trailer) and the long range radar and forward-facing sonar (which are usually mounted too low to be useful in this specific situation**).
e.g.: the LIDAR of my parents' Volvo has correctly seens object obstructing high. like a low blaconny under which I'm paking the hood of the car. Though it has sometime a little bit pannicked (highly reflective barrier of the tool both on some french highway that is slowly raising + LIDAR = over-reaction, car is already in "ready to do an emergency break" mode although there's enough clearance).
It violated the Basic Speed Law just as surely as if it had been driving the speed limit in heavy fog, and that's a programming error.
That evokes 2 comments for me:
- Yes but that require the car being able to realise that it doesn't see. It's not behaviour to react to something it's seeing, it's being able to predict that it's not seeing something, which is a much harder problem. The car might simply NOT realise that it's missing something.
Most of the car monoscopic systems that I've seen demoed in detail (there are tons of example on Youtube, even some code for OpenCV floating around) use some simplistic projection to infer the 3D structure of what they see. Then they detect 2D shapes on the pictures and use them to infer presence absence of edge in the projected 3D environment. (Such system can't make the difference between "there is no edge 10m in front of me" and "there an edgeless mass right in front of me obstructing the view") I don't have a way to know if Autopilot's monoscopic camera works this way** (or if it does pick extra 3D cue due to motion tracking and parallax/perspective). But it will be definitely at a loss here.
Compare that with humans which have a *pair* of eyes, a stereoscopic system able to provide depth perception (unless the image is completely feature less - and then you CAN infere that there's something wrong) (the wrong usually being expressed as some form of sea sickness). Same with cars using stereoscopic cameras (I've seen it on some Mercedes, and several japanese brands like Mazda), they'll definitely either have a complete 3D representation of the environment (not infered by projection, but actually based on image-pair correlation) or will lack one which is an information that there's something deeply wrong (e.g.: very desne fog). Slightly similar with cars using LIDAR (though it has a bit better visibility in case of fog by virtue
That was the strategy in place in the hospital were I've done most of my internship.
The name tab doubles as a smartcard.
Except that, to be able to actually function, they need to give very broad access rights to very large segment of their personnel.
e.g.: all doctors, and nearly all medical students, can open almost any door (with very few exceptions like high voltage transf. station, elevator shaft, etc.)
Which isn't the best practice from a security point of view, but is the best compromise between regulation (everything needs to be locked !!!) and emergency situations (need to send the student to get some medication).
Also, no, someone won't die right in front of you because of a forgotten password, except maybe in a movie. Real-life healthcare doesn't work like that.
But real-life insurance, politics and regulation *do*.
e.g.: "Scheduled substance must always be kept locked" says the regulation. So they're in a locked box. (Because, you know... some drug addict my steal them from a hospital for a change instead of trying to cook meth in their garden shed as usual~ )
But half of those scheduled substances might actually become useful in some emergency cases.
So the key to this box is hanging on a chain nearby / the pincode is written on a sticky note on the door. (I'm not making this up, I've seen such situations).
A young docotor might be on night shift / rounds in internal medicine. Means they are the only on on the whole floor (not only their sector but all the other sector on the same floor), and are the first responder in case of emergency until more staff is summoned and arrives. If anything happens, they'll need to have access to all the necessary medication (some not so small backpack, filled with ampoules of nearly every substance needed. Some of which are regulated so the backpack needs to be locked when not in use). They need to have that access unhindered (there should be no confusion because they're not in their usual sector and not know necessarily how to access the backpack). Hence the "misuse security" solution above.
Otherwise they would need to carry their own (not light at all) backpack everywhere with them (I've seen this also on some situations of military medicine or on terrain emergency response).
And that's just the drugs.
There's also the problem with devices. Ultrasound images come *EXTREMELY* handy in several emergency situations (to quickly see what's inside, to better and faster pinpoint a blood vessel or a nerve or the airways for some procedures, etc.) If you can't get your image *NOW* just because you need to log into the fucking computer, somebody is going to die.
At least for that situation the tendency is changing. Instead of the just honking "computer on a tray with an US-imaging head" attached to it, emergency medicine is starting to rely on very small portable device (the size of a netbook, a tablet, or even a smartphone) that are completely offline (their only mean of communication with the outside world is a USB or SD port to save picture to- / upload updates from-) and contain no patient related data (the only attached metadata is the current time the picture was taken. And by "metadata attached", I mean it's part of the file name, because the device doesn't even bother to fill in the corresponding DICOM fields. (= it a standard medical imaging format. A bit like what JPEG is for internet picture. And just like JPEG can have EXIF, a DICOM can contain a lot of information from the patient file)
So it's just: open the device, shoot the picture, done. No fumbling wiht stupid passwords.
Hey wait, didn't there used to be an invention just like this, but completely mechanical?
And given the complexity of a modern hospital, you'd have about half a kilogram worth of keys on your keyring just to get around. And in some emergency situations, you will need to quickly to yank 4 of them out of your keyring and throw them to a medical student passing by (or a medical nurse passing by which by chance happens not to be required by the emergency) to send them to the pharmacy to bring you some extra medication.
Long before the invention of password, physical keys used to be "hidden" nearby critical doors. (e.g.: Legally, morphine needs to be locked. But morphine can definitely be needed in a case of emergency. Therefor the key to access the box with morphine is hanging on a chain nearby). (Actual anecdote in one of the military clinics were I've worked).
The closest actual equivalent that works up to some point is a wireless keycard (usually integrated into the name tab), with the infrastructure programmed to allow you around depending on it. (I.e.: the access doors don't require a specific pin code, but are programmed to allow personal with a keycard which has been validated for that door). (More or less done this way in the hospital where I did my studies).
But even then you'll find problems:
- You would need to give very broad access rights to very large groups of personnel, which isn't considered as a very bright practice. (e.g.: absolutely all doctors and medical students would need to be granted access to nearly every door. Except maybe for the server room, the elevator shaft and the high-voltage transformation station. Because there are actually dozens of emergency scenarios where this will actually be needed)
- Or you need to find a way to quickly grant access to someone else.
- And even then, you need to make sure you have a correct strategy to make sure that all the access rights are up to date.
- You must be sure that the system won't block legitimate emergency access in case of total failure.
Until the cleaning people throw it out the evening after it was installed.
Or in other words: you don't even need physical access to retrieve the recorder. Or find a believable excuse when you're spotted rummaging through the above-mentionned trashcan.
You only need to throw garbage (drop a new empty recorder) once in a while in the trash, and count on the cleaning staff to unknowingly "retrieve" it for you.
Slashdot Mirror
The theory goes something like:
a detailled enough map could indicate which intersections DO have a traffic light.
If the car doesn't see neither a green light nor a red, but map indicates there should be one, the car should be able to know that it has missed a traffic light and slow down and safely ask to hand control back to the human in time.
(It's NOT entirely possible. There are database like SCDB.info that counts all known speed- / redlight- traps. Knowing that some European Cities put a dual function speed+redlight trap at nearly all crossings, that basically amounts to have a database of traffic light in those cities).
In practice, Google Cars engineer have found at that maps would need to be excurciatingly detailled. And need to be kept up to date on a very fast schedule. (There might be construction, etc. changing the layout of some crossing an thus traffic lights position, etc.)
Which mandates to constantly rescan the streets.
Which would suggest that equipping all the fleet of cars with detector to see such change.
At which point, you realise that a car able to map out the change in traffic light... ...could instead directly see the traffic lights themselves.
Once you've solved the problem of seeing reliably enough traffic lights in order to accurately update the map, you don't need the ultra-accurate map anymore.
So no. GPS assistance *might* seem a great idea, but actually not.
but my backing camera gets crapped up a lot more easily than my mirrors do.
Of course. You backing camera is usually situated at the back of the car where it is exposed to lots of mud and dust projections.
Whereas your rear-view mirror is usually *INSIDE* the car.
Of course one is going to get dirty faster than the other.
Whereas for side mirror...
And any likely camera location on the vehicle is likely to get covered with snow more quickly and thoroughly than my side mirrors do.
...in my experience: No.
The side mirrors have a thin rim at the bottom (the must be orientable, so there's always a small rim), and snow DOES accumulate here
(though for the record, most north-european brand will heat the mirror in cold weather to avoid fog build-up, but this can also quickly melt any accumulated snow).
Where as the side cameras (used for automatic detection of vehicles in the blind spots) a pointing a little bit downward and thus don't offer a surface where snow can accumulate.
(In theory, a long period of freezing and melting could slowly bulid an ice stalactite obscuring the view of the camera. In practice they're heated to anyway, again to avoid fog build up, but that would detach any ice stalactite too).
Except for the blind spots. {...} Sideview cameras will likely have similar advantages.
A driver will only occasionally turn their head to watch blind spots. They might forget.
Whereas systems like BLIS can be constantly watching the road and blink a light nearby the mirror alerting the driver of the presence of a vehicle in the blind spot.
Combine it with sideway pointing sonars and you're almost sure that no driver is every going to accidentally cut somebody up.
Yeah because regular non-electronic mirrors never ever get broken, at all!!!
They are all made of iPhone 8-grade gorilla glass, feature a mithril reflective coating and are encased in adamantium.
(ob staw comic ref)
I suffered more frequently from mirror broken by anonymous dip-shit while leaving my vehicle parked somewhere (when they aren't straigh breaking the whole car), than I've suffered electronics failure since I've started driving cars with cameras on them.
(And that's ignoring the fact that some cars feature a very nice rear camera view, while the back window is absolutely tiny and thus the rear view mirror is useless).
Retractable side mirrors are really a saver on recent cars.
Replacing them with cameras is:
- one protruding item less that will get destroyed.
- less obstacles that interrupt the aerodynamic shape of the car.
They got about half of the power you'd get from putting the solar panels on a roof.
Which (= panels on a roof) is exactly what some people in (south) Korea seem to be trying to experiment with.
Sometimes it is a good idea to test this stuff out before jumping into conclusions on why it may be a bad idea.
And sometimes, it's good to make just some ballpark guesstimate before jumping into the first "freaking" meme-filled kickstarter project.
And regarding the Solar Roads, there's simply no way that the numbers could add up.
So either:
A. - The creators actually have a few big not-yet announced technological surprises up their sleeves that they'll releave as a last minute surprise
(which isn't entirely impossible: there's a lot of research being done on solar pannels' efficiency, LEDs efficiency, etc.)
And that would explain why the estimets under estimate the project.
B. - The ceators are way over-optimistic and are hoping too much.
The estimation are right and the project will only work for a very limited definition of work (like the tile barely able to power themselves. Not replacing all the coal power plants and powering thousands of home).
Given how much hype-driven this campaign looks like, I might be, there's a high chance that we're witnessing "B".
Climate science has been tested and proven over and over again using numerous different methods, which all broadly lead to more or less the same ballpark of conclusion.
The only actually *REAL* controversy that exist among scientific is about the minute details of interpretation (like the exact expected decimals at the end of the predicted number), not about the broad existence of climate change.
From this perspective it's quite normal to have strong scepticism against pseudo-scientist trying to stir controversies around climate change without bringing any new data to the table.
OTOH
fMRI is a rather noisy and low resolution recent method.
Some results have been confirmed multiple time using large studies, and comparing to numerous other methods (like study of brain-accident victims, like tests done in parallel during brain-cancer surgery, like information learned from neuro-anatomy, etc.)
Other information really come from a couple of small studies with very few samples, that aren't replicated yet, nor confirmed by any other methodology. It might be too early to shout "Brain region responsible fro 'XyZ' found !!!!"
Is that the software ecosystem for this is so small that it seems to affect across many MRI vendors.
Nope. It's that the vendor only takes care to write the bit of software that actually controls the MRI machine.
The vendor takes care of the low-level and behind the scene work need to they point where you obtain an image - usually in a standard format like DICOM.
(think about the firmware inside a digital point and shoot camera, which is in charge of controlling the CCD, the flash and the zoom/focus, and whose purpose is to write a JPEG file on the storage media at the end).
Whatever you do with the DICOM out of the machine is up to you.
A doctor could display it using some viewing software to make some clinical conclusion.
It could be stored in archives to be referenced later to see the progression of some condition.
Or you could try to do some stats on it.
(to keep the photography metaphore: you're free to just look to your JPEG, or store it on your Drop Box/Google Drive/iCloud/the Fappen... oops. Or run it through GIMP, or even import it into Blender as texture for some even more elaborate artwork).
There are a lot of viewer software both opensource (Osirix, Aeskulap) and closed source (sometime even provided as part of a deal with the manufacturer of the MRI).
Because the market is much smaller, and because research need to pool their efforts together, there are fewer imaging research software pipelines.
Most of them are usually opensource and organized around specific project of some universities.
(e.g.: the BrainVisa pipeline, FreeSurfer, etc.) which tend to reuse similar building blocks in their pipelines (FSL is used around a lot).
The claim is quite dubious in that it seems to suggest that scientists know someone is going to move their arm before the person does, simply from reading MRI images.
Not MRI image.
But f MRI images (where f = "functional")
In a nutshell, those image are based around the fact that hemoglobin loaded with oxygen interacts and distorts the magnetic field differently than hemoglobin which has discarded its oxygen.
By measure these signal differences, it's possible to infer where there's more oxygen consumption, and from there try to guess which parts of the brain are working more (and thus consuming more oxygen).
Spatial resolution of such image is "not so great" (blurier thant the brain anatomy visible on the brain itself), but still acceptable.
Reach is very good (you can see the whole inside of the skull).
Signal strength is very weak (very subtle variation, meaning lot's of noise).
Temporal resolution is very poor (to begin with all MRI images take a lot of time to take, and then there's the problem is that you're not measuring brain activity directly, but you're inferring it from its indirect effect on the local blood flow).
Still it's a useful tool under some circumstances.
Compare it with other tools, like measuring electric (EEG) or magnetic activity from ther outside:
Spatial resolution is absolutely shitty (you must infer what's happening from a few points scattered across the surface of the scalp)
Reach isn't deep at all (you mostly see what's happening on the surface. Deep brain structures are too deep to be visible).
Temporal resolution is amazing (you can measure the direct electrical output ms after ms)
The best tool it still open-skull surgeries (using electrodes directly on the brain to measure activities or to very precisely stimulate some area), but they are a rare commodity (= you can only find volunteers to enroll into your studies among people getting brain surgery to remove tumors).
The second best tool is the clinical description of psychiatric damage experienced by people who where victim of accident where their brain was damaged.
EEG and fMRI are coarser tools, but much easier to setup.
In addition to that anatomists and histologist have had tons of other tools to explore the anatomy and connections of the brain.
(regular MRI, dissections of cadavers, study of some virus which climb along the nerves, some freezing-/cracking- based special technique of dissection, some special type of diffusion-MRI, etc. )
I find that hard to believe except possibly in some limited cases.
The whole central nervous system works in stage, from very low level (nerves controlling muscles or nerves fed by receptors) all the way to high-level (processing complex information).
Most of the low-level (i.e.: most of the body, except the eyes, ears and a few other head organs) is connected to a region in the mid of the brain, roughly around where the head band of your headphone goes.
Except for a few preprocessing done in the spine (or in the upper layers of the retina in eyes) the signal is very close to raw (1 point of connection = 1 information about a small group of receptor. Like an edge).
Everything behind this "headband" handle signal input and perception. And the more you get away to the point where nervous tracts connects to the cortex, the more integration and convolution is done with the signal (from edges to shapes to objects like "face recognition") and combination with other signals (associative region, which aren't specific to a single sense and can't be pinpointed down to a precise simple role).
Everything in front of this "headband" handle the signal output and motor control. It has the same overall organisation: the more you move to the front away from the "headband", the more the processing is "high-level" and "multimodal" and handles high level functi
Well, normally I change speed using the accelerator (errr, "gas pedal") and brake - I suspect you mean changing gear selection, rather than changing speed.
Ooops, sorry. My bad. English isn't my first language, and some of the laguage I speak tend to use the same word for both concept.
'D' for drive ; 'P' for park ; '1' for ultra-low speed (pedestrian-designated areas), '2' for low speed (traffic jams), and 'R' for reversing, as I recall. I don't recall ever seeing a "+" or "-" on the mode selector.
Whoa! I haven't seen "1" and "2" in ages... (And I change frequently cars as I mostly drive them from car-sharing)
1 & 2 are an older simpler and coarser concept:
- instead of the transmission being fully automatic (like in "D") and choosing any possible gear ratio from the list
- 1 and 2 are restricted: they're still automatic but limit the transmission to only a smaller subset of the list of gear ratios.
Nearly any modern non-electric car that I've driven recently has the sequential type of control that I've described before:
- either + or - sign that you tap on the sides of the "D" mode
- or a separate "M" mode that has + and - above and below it
With that, you manually ask the automatic transmission to force gear up and down.
Oh, hang on, I'm not sure if that was an IC engine or an electric - I didn't have any reason to ask.
Usually electric cars won't have old-style 1 and 2 or new-style + and -. Because they only have one single gear ratio and just spin the motor faster or slower without problems.
(In fact even "D" and "R" are purely software. No gears are shifted, only a different pattern is sent to the electro-magnets so the rotor spins in the other direction)
The closest thing I've seen to a mode is an "eco" button sitting nearby the selector that will limit the power consumption of the motor (It will never eat more than xx kW, unless you floor the accelerator pedal) which make it accelerate slower and might limit the top speed, but vastly increase the range.
You've got to press a button on the side of the mode selector before you can change modes - "tapping" it anywhere is prevented by an interlock in the selector. I remember having to figure that out first time I found myself with the keys to an automatic.
So more recent cars have a special mode (either D or M) where tapping is not prevented, but actually signals your wish that the automatic transmission changes gear. (When in the corresponding mode, the selector isn't firmly locked in place, but some wiggling is allowed to convey such commands)
Most more modern cars I've seen tend to have the button not on the side, but so placed (under the forward facing part) that you'll automatically press it when you grasp firmly the selector.
(Also, the mode selector is where a normal gear selector is - not on the steering column, as I see in the movies.
I've never seen a steering-column selector. (Except for specially adapted cars for disabled people, or some weird construction machines)
Which movie do you refer to ?
Or do you refer to the letters display on the dashboard itself ?
The machines don't seem to know when to drop down a gear in order to increase engine revs and power. Totally gutless response in consequence.
More modern car might react if you press the accelerator pedal more firmly and automatically drop gear and rev up to give you more power.
The auto cruise
The other options are only more "efficient" if you place no value on your time or personal convenience. You might choose to spend an hour on public transportation instead of a 30 minute drive to save $10, but I would usually not.
In several European cities, the situations is actually reversed:
- They are over crowded. Unless you want to get around at unusual hours, there is going to be traffic jams everywhere.
- Public transportation is usually circulating separately and isn't affected by jams (city trams and bus might just have separate lanes. Or the metro trafic is completely underground in cities that have them).
- Long distance train have high speed. Car speeds on highway are usually limited to 120 or 130km/h depending on the countries (...but not in Germany. Only local segments are limited, there's no general limitation), whereas the train usually drive at 150~180km/h (or higher depending on the local type of high-speed trains).
So depending on your destination, public transportation *might* actually get you there faster. (and much safer)
But on the other hand it costs a bit.
Same also for short in-city trips by bike:
- Lots of European cities have separate bike-lanes. (and in lots of jurisdiction, when there's no bike lane, bikes are supposed to form separate lines)
So bicycles aren't affect by traffic jams
- Altought a car's *top* speed (=the speed limitation in the street) is higher than a bicycle's, a bicycle's *avarage* speed ( = still close to the top speed) is higher than the speed of a car stuck in a traffic jam.
So, in summary, in several european big cities, not taking the car it the thing that actually saves you time.
(Or, alternatively, managing to have a work where you can shop up and go home outside of rush hours).
Is it possible to drive an automatic like a manual gearbox?
What do you mean?
Is to possible to manually decide when the vehicle changes speed, like on a manual gearbox?
Yes. As long as the vehicle has actual gears (i.e.: a car with an internal combustion engine) the car will have, in addition to the fully automatic mode ("D" on the gear shift) also have a "sequential gearbox"-mode ("+" and "-" on the gear shift).
Depending on the model, you either tap the stick side ways, or you move the stick to a different position (sometimes called "M") and tap up and down.
This way, your manually control when the gearbox moves to a higher or lower speed.
Depending on your driving style, that might come handy when driving in the mountain.
But the car usually prevents you from destroying it. You can't accelerate to 100km/h while still in 1st gear, the system will shift gear to prevent you from staying too long in over-rev.
On the other hand, this option doesn't exist on vehicle that don't have actual gears (obviously):
(i.e.: there isn't a list of fixed of gear ratio that you select from with a stick, the ratio is a continuously changing real number depending on the speed)
(there's only one fixed ratio ever. But the electric motor itself is always working best no matter its RPMs)
It's not only about pushing a non-existing brake.
You also have an inborn reflex to brace for impact. A kid see the big thing in front, and a kid know automatically to hold on thing.
Which, while growing up, have also adapted to brace for the incoming quick braking.A growing kid/teen see the big thing in front and know to hold on things, because the braking will send thing flying around.
MAIN POINT: You'll see the behaviour even in non-driving individuals
("non drivers" might sound bizarre to the average USian, but assure you that on the other side of the atlantic pond, we have plenty of them in continental europe where the public transportation is good enough).
Then once you start learning to drive, you built the instinct to throw your right foot on the braking pedal to save your life
(if the anti-collision system of the car isn't already doing that for you).
So the sore braking foot is a combination of all of the above:
- you wanting to break inconsciously.
- but also your instinct trying to save you from imminent impact/avoid flying around on braking.
it just that, by now, due to the previous mechanism you tend to preferably throw forward your braking foot.
(instead of say, holding both feet while grasping the hand grab)
My camera knows when it's missing details such as the edge of the "white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky". When the histogram clips either to the left or the right, a self-driving car should determine whether each blank area of the image is big enough to conceal a hazard (unlike glare on a piece of chrome, for example),
Yup, that's a possible strategy, that apparently wasn't added to the software yet.
On the other hand, I will only react in badly lit condition (white vehicle in an over-lit scene / black vehicle in an underlit scene), it won't necessarily react correctly in case of fog (everything is washed out even the mid-range) or snow (the scene is just a huge cluster fuck of motion noise).
But yeah definitely extra strategies need to be added. And I stand by my previous comment, an extra "sense" must be added for this specific range (like a lidar)
and if so, slow down and be prepared to stop.
- a car (not necessarily Autopilot, even simpler tech like collision avoidance is *always* ready to break).
- you've successfully demonstrated that the car can determine that it can't see a region, what should it be "ready for" if it can't see there ?
- the correct course of action (like with humans and with simpler collision avoidance) would be to adapt the speed/braking to the visibility range.
i.e.: if Autopilot determins that there's a zone it can't distinguish 50m a head, it should automatically slow down to speed where the braking range is shorter like 40m. So if suddenly an object "pops out" of the visibility range and is suddenly seen to pose a collision risk, the car can break in time.
- the car should also have a clear protocole to hand control back to the human.
I.e.: if visibility goes bonkers, to start slowing down quickly while sounding an alarm asking the human driver to pay attention to the road instead to the movie.
Speaking of which...
WHAT THE HELL ?!?!?
You're driving an experimental technology, and you're absorbed by a movie ?
I you want to completely forget about the road and look a movie, there are vehicle better adapted to that:
it's called "public transportation", we have plenty of it here around on the European continent...
Or you know, simply being a passenger on the ride, e.g.: car pooling...
Driving *alone* in a vehicle isn't terribly efficient (although in this case it's a Tesla which has been proved to be a little bit better to the environment, even if you factor in the construction of the vehicle and the production of the energy).
It's always better to share the ride, and if the passanger also knows to drive, that's an extra eye (a third one in addition to the human driver and to Autopilot).
I usually travel in this configuration when on vacation road trip: parents' Volvo got a collision avoidance system, I am the driver, and my passenger knows enough to whatch the road too, while the rest of the team parties hard on the back seat...
Got a solution to the above? Let me answer for you - no you dont.
- One already possible solution is to have the first truck in a convoy being still maned (a la Tesla: autopilot but with human supervisor) and the human can still be in charge of the whole convoy if anything happens.
- Other possible solution would be to subcontracts handling of such problems to 3rd party companies operated by actual humans.
If the robotruck notice anything bizare, it can summon an operator to come check at it.
- More sensors, more redundancy, higher level of controls.
such robotruck could detect anomalies very early and could automatically ask for a check at the next station they stop by.
or could still operate with one blown tire until the next station.
Autonomus trucks are a bigger fucking pipedream than autonomous cars - it isnt going to happen fo 30 years at least.
Meanwhile, high speed european trains have seen lots of automation happen.
It's a different use case (e.g.: trains don't have tires that can blow up), but it still an example of a serious commercial application where the necessary staff has progressively shrunk.
There are strong advantages and economic incentives for robotruck, so it is bound to happen.
Imagine a truck on a roadway, going from one loading dock to another, as an elevator car, or a "people-mover" style unmanned train.
Some countries (hello switzerland) have already replaced huge portions of the trucks traffic with actual trains.
(Well manned train. With an operator paying close attention if anything goes wrong with the semi-automated high-speed train)
Nope.
Kinect is based on a technology by PrimeSense which couple 2 cameras.
- one regular one for colors
- one infrared one for depth
Mobileye is a manufacturer of monoscopic cameras.
Their software works on pure flat image that (apparently) where depth is infered from a projection.
The cause, speculated by the blogger, was that "As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview.", which sounds less like it's less about performance and more about discouragement, lack of self-confidence, and other factors.
As a side-note (a very *side*-note):
It's also my experience in sports.
When I'm not stuck in front of a keyboard doing biomedical research, my hobby is outdoor sports, more precisely ski (Yay, European Alps !) and I regularily exercice this hobby of mine as a ski teacher. (Mind you: Not that seriously. It's just a hobby, not a profession to bring the dough)
As part our training as teachers we periodically need to give lessons to kids (the rest of the time, I teach ski at the university to adults).
And there's also a tendency that I've seen:
- young girls tend much more often to under-evaluate their performance, lack some self-confidence, etc.
(at this level of ski, mostly to teach them so they can have some fun, not train the future olympic team, girls aren't at a biological disadvantage.
although they might put a little bit less muscle mass for a given level of training than boys (=with higher steroid hormone level),
they tend to have a lower center of mass which helps a bit in sliding/disbalancing sports.)
So girls aren't necessarily performing worse than the boys, but lots of them do perceive it that way, due to lack of self confidence.
Except for a few individuals( who don't give a damn about pecking order or anything, and seem clearly aware of their own capabilities...
(and also seem completely unaffected by all the belittling jokes that kids throw at each other during sports).
Part of the way I organise my lessons involves therefore also helping my students (both kids and adults) to realise what they manage to accomplish.
And if the image was so washed out that it couldn't make out the outline, then because it couldn't see clearly, the car shouldn't have been moving so fast. {...} It would also help to upgrade the camera to one with a wider dynamic range and/or more resolution so the image is less likely to get washed out again.
That or add an entirely different class of sensors.
There's a reason why Volvo supplements their forward facing camera and long-range radar with a LIDAR, same with some Mercedes.
Or that for their city safety (only slow speed in city collision avoidance. No lane detect) the little VW Up counts on a LIDAR instead of a camera.
A camera has the same limitations that human eyes have (and actually even worse, due to lower dynamic range and different resolution*)
If you cannot see it, chances are that the camera won't be able either.
On the other hand, because they are self-illuminated, and because they return a different kind of information (depth, instead of shapes of colour) a LIDAR might cleary perceive the contour of a white object on a white background.
It has its own limitations (highly reflective / no reflective at all surfaces), but would add new useful information to supplement what is provided by the current Autopilot camera (which might miss a white-on-white object like this trailer) and the long range radar and forward-facing sonar (which are usually mounted too low to be useful in this specific situation**).
e.g.: the LIDAR of my parents' Volvo has correctly seens object obstructing high. like a low blaconny under which I'm paking the hood of the car.
Though it has sometime a little bit pannicked (highly reflective barrier of the tool both on some french highway that is slowly raising + LIDAR = over-reaction, car is already in "ready to do an emergency break" mode although there's enough clearance).
It violated the Basic Speed Law just as surely as if it had been driving the speed limit in heavy fog, and that's a programming error.
That evokes 2 comments for me:
- Yes but that require the car being able to realise that it doesn't see.
It's not behaviour to react to something it's seeing, it's being able to predict that it's not seeing something, which is a much harder problem.
The car might simply NOT realise that it's missing something.
Most of the car monoscopic systems that I've seen demoed in detail (there are tons of example on Youtube, even some code for OpenCV floating around) use some simplistic projection to infer the 3D structure of what they see.
Then they detect 2D shapes on the pictures and use them to infer presence absence of edge in the projected 3D environment.
(Such system can't make the difference between "there is no edge 10m in front of me" and "there an edgeless mass right in front of me obstructing the view")
I don't have a way to know if Autopilot's monoscopic camera works this way** (or if it does pick extra 3D cue due to motion tracking and parallax/perspective).
But it will be definitely at a loss here.
Compare that with humans which have a *pair* of eyes, a stereoscopic system able to provide depth perception (unless the image is completely feature less - and then you CAN infere that there's something wrong) (the wrong usually being expressed as some form of sea sickness).
Same with cars using stereoscopic cameras (I've seen it on some Mercedes, and several japanese brands like Mazda), they'll definitely either have a complete 3D representation of the environment (not infered by projection, but actually based on image-pair correlation) or will lack one which is an information that there's something deeply wrong (e.g.: very desne fog).
Slightly similar with cars using LIDAR (though it has a bit better visibility in case of fog by virtue
That was the strategy in place in the hospital were I've done most of my internship.
The name tab doubles as a smartcard.
Except that, to be able to actually function, they need to give very broad access rights to very large segment of their personnel.
e.g.: all doctors, and nearly all medical students, can open almost any door (with very few exceptions like high voltage transf. station, elevator shaft, etc.)
Which isn't the best practice from a security point of view, but is the best compromise between regulation (everything needs to be locked !!!) and emergency situations (need to send the student to get some medication).
Woah! That sounds like a wonderful place to work in!
I wish I did my intership there instead of the usual understaffed place, similar to the one described above.
Also, no, someone won't die right in front of you because of a forgotten password, except maybe in a movie. Real-life healthcare doesn't work like that.
But real-life insurance, politics and regulation *do*.
e.g.: "Scheduled substance must always be kept locked" says the regulation. So they're in a locked box.
(Because, you know... some drug addict my steal them from a hospital for a change instead of trying to cook meth in their garden shed as usual~ )
But half of those scheduled substances might actually become useful in some emergency cases.
So the key to this box is hanging on a chain nearby / the pincode is written on a sticky note on the door.
(I'm not making this up, I've seen such situations).
A young docotor might be on night shift / rounds in internal medicine.
Means they are the only on on the whole floor (not only their sector but all the other sector on the same floor), and are the first responder in case of emergency until more staff is summoned and arrives.
If anything happens, they'll need to have access to all the necessary medication (some not so small backpack, filled with ampoules of nearly every substance needed. Some of which are regulated so the backpack needs to be locked when not in use). They need to have that access unhindered (there should be no confusion because they're not in their usual sector and not know necessarily how to access the backpack).
Hence the "misuse security" solution above.
Otherwise they would need to carry their own (not light at all) backpack everywhere with them (I've seen this also on some situations of military medicine or on terrain emergency response).
And that's just the drugs.
There's also the problem with devices. Ultrasound images come *EXTREMELY* handy in several emergency situations (to quickly see what's inside, to better and faster pinpoint a blood vessel or a nerve or the airways for some procedures, etc.)
If you can't get your image *NOW* just because you need to log into the fucking computer, somebody is going to die.
At least for that situation the tendency is changing. Instead of the just honking "computer on a tray with an US-imaging head" attached to it, emergency medicine is starting to rely on very small portable device (the size of a netbook, a tablet, or even a smartphone) that are completely offline (their only mean of communication with the outside world is a USB or SD port to save picture to- / upload updates from-) and contain no patient related data (the only attached metadata is the current time the picture was taken. And by "metadata attached", I mean it's part of the file name, because the device doesn't even bother to fill in the corresponding DICOM fields.
(= it a standard medical imaging format. A bit like what JPEG is for internet picture. And just like JPEG can have EXIF, a DICOM can contain a lot of information from the patient file)
So it's just: open the device, shoot the picture, done. No fumbling wiht stupid passwords.
Hey wait, didn't there used to be an invention just like this, but completely mechanical?
And given the complexity of a modern hospital, you'd have about half a kilogram worth of keys on your keyring just to get around.
And in some emergency situations, you will need to quickly to yank 4 of them out of your keyring and throw them to a medical student passing by (or a medical nurse passing by which by chance happens not to be required by the emergency) to send them to the pharmacy to bring you some extra medication.
Long before the invention of password, physical keys used to be "hidden" nearby critical doors.
(e.g.: Legally, morphine needs to be locked. But morphine can definitely be needed in a case of emergency. Therefor the key to access the box with morphine is hanging on a chain nearby).
(Actual anecdote in one of the military clinics were I've worked).
The closest actual equivalent that works up to some point is a wireless keycard (usually integrated into the name tab), with the infrastructure programmed to allow you around depending on it.
(I.e.: the access doors don't require a specific pin code, but are programmed to allow personal with a keycard which has been validated for that door).
(More or less done this way in the hospital where I did my studies).
But even then you'll find problems:
- You would need to give very broad access rights to very large groups of personnel, which isn't considered as a very bright practice.
(e.g.: absolutely all doctors and medical students would need to be granted access to nearly every door. Except maybe for the server room, the elevator shaft and the high-voltage transformation station. Because there are actually dozens of emergency scenarios where this will actually be needed)
- Or you need to find a way to quickly grant access to someone else.
- And even then, you need to make sure you have a correct strategy to make sure that all the access rights are up to date.
- You must be sure that the system won't block legitimate emergency access in case of total failure.
Pencils are very resistant to virus attacks.
We're speaking about hospitals.
Google about "Nosocomial infections", "MRSA", etc.
Nope. Not even pencils are resistant to virus attacks.
Just not the same virus.
Until the cleaning people throw it out the evening after it was installed.
Or in other words: you don't even need physical access to retrieve the recorder.
Or find a believable excuse when you're spotted rummaging through the above-mentionned trashcan.
You only need to throw garbage (drop a new empty recorder) once in a while in the trash,
and count on the cleaning staff to unknowingly "retrieve" it for you.