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#which is certainly not feasible for school I have to take digital notes or else I will fail classes but also
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Update on my mental health testing I’ve been doing since I finally got my diagnosis. I was not diagnosed with adhd or ocd like I thought I’d be. Apparently there is a disorder for inattentiveness due to screen time that I’m diagnosed with but was told that doesn’t cover all of my issues. And then I was told that I’d need some more testing to prove this but the psychologist testing me thinks that I just have too high of an iq and am simply bored. Catch me making a list of symptoms now both good and bad
#my iq is just too high. if that’s it I swear I’m gonna lose it. I’m bored?? that’s my problem??? everything’s too easy???#yeah so I get an iq test next fall#she’s like I think that would cover a lot of things! and also why you’re able to be doing relatively ok in life#like girl I’m suffering out here#anyways. my tests all mostly asked about what I struggled with which is mostly just. no motivation procrastination#but my day to day life?? includes obsessing over the things I love checking in online like clockwork and definitely obsessing over my things#little witch single handedly is shaping huge parts of my life bc I love it so much and definitely not a normal amount#like. I’m taking odd classes I would have never taken moving even more cross country in a year to do voice acting and just like#dedicating tons and tons of time to just. interacting with people who love the show as much as I do as well as making my friends watch it#i am by no means upset with my diagnosis my psychologist was like this is the thought you need lots more testing tho#with an additional hey I put in ur results that I’ll give to the school that u clearly need help and to get you in for more testing#also she did mention that if I wanted to totally rule out the screen time thing I’d probably have to do like a complete detox for 60 days#which is certainly not feasible for school I have to take digital notes or else I will fail classes but also#quite frankly I’d die. like my mental health would speed run itself so far down I would simply die#so! i certainly will not allow that to happen bc I’m not interesting in seeing how hot glued my brain is together via the internet#probably very. but yeah essentially I have gained nothing except my time on the waitlist is up#¯\_(ツ)_/¯#soup talks
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Hopeless
This is a translation of a post that was originally written in Dutch. The original post can be found here. All Dutch posts can be found here. Please note that all the sources in this post are in Dutch.
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About a week (or two, my sense of time has never been more disturbed than ever before) ago I had a conversation with my mom. The reason for it can be found in something I like to call ‘having a crisis’. I often mean it as a joke and I use it in instances such as having a ‘difficult’ time choosing which pair of shoes to wear today. There are also moments where I use it for its intended purpose. The moment with my mom was one of them.
We were talking about the coronacrisis (what else do you talk about) and it did not take long for young people to enter the conversation. If you are talking about young people and corona, the future can not stay out of the conversation. This was the moment where, if it were a movie, the camera would have zoomed in and the director would clap at the end of the take.
Uncertainty
The fact that I am uncertain about my future is no secret. Where that uncertainty left a lot of room for thinking in possibilities, creating (my own) opportunities and excitement just a few months ago. Uncertainty can cause a certain tension and excitement. Wanting to find out what the next step in the adventure is. I think that in many ways, life is also a story. Most people often want to know how a story continues and ends, I often consume media for my interest in storylines. I find that I often can get sucked into fictional storylines and I often feel a certain excitement to find out how story will continue and how the characters will develop.
Until recently, I felt a bit of the same excitement to find out how my story would unfold itself. I still had some nice concerts and festivals planned in March. Some of it would without a doubt lead to adventures with friends and maybe we would even experience things we would tell stories of in a few years’ time. In the meantime, I am over the change of schedule and I have either already been informed about new dates or I am still awaiting new dates. The feeling of waiting and persevering is something that I have experienced to some extent. For me, that is often something that is very basic to many people, such as a deadline or a concert. A deadline is not very special to me, but a concert is. It is a place where I feel safe, I can be myself and I can express myself and see (some of) my friends. It is a second home and I mainly miss the emotional side. In the meantime, it is not so much about the basic experience of live music anymore, but about falling into the arms of my friends (or a stranger, it happens and it is fun). To feel their warmth on top of the warmth of the room. That is something I was so looking forward to before.
Benchmarks
Things like concerts, other events, but also deadlines and evenings I work on are benchmarks for me. These benchmarks seem to be essential in my schedule, but above all to sort out the chaos in my head. Have all my benchmarks been dropped? No, they have changed. I work one evening a week, have meetings for volunteer work once every three weeks and my school year has now come to an end. Those are actually my ‘fixed benchmarks’. I find or make other benchmarks myself by following certain TV shows, planning a movie night for myself, Skype with friends, following a digital festival and simply the start of the next school year in September. These benchmarks do a lot for me and are important to me, but they are also a painful reminder of everything that has become so different. Where I would normally be with my friends at a concert or on a terrace, it is now digital or remote. It is not so bad for us, we are young and grew up with technology, but in a digital or physical conversation at a distance I still miss our hugs and the warmth I feel when entering and leaving. My benchmark at the start of the new school year in September brings the good tension to find out what is to come but also the less good tension. Both for the exact same reason. I mentioned earlier that uncertainty can cause a certain tension and excitement. Of course I am looking forward to a (semi)determined rhythm and the accumulation of knowledge, although these two things are already feasible given the fact that I now have enough time and know my way around the Internet. I am looking forward to learning something, working together, gaining and developing skills and getting one step closer to the of my studies. The latter is something that also gives me a lot of fear. In a plan for next year, I mentioned that the world of tomorrow can not predicted, let alone the in a few months, or a few years.
Uncertainty, worry and hopelessness
I think a little uncertainty can not hurt, but a whole load of uncertainty over a longer period of time does not seem to be a breeding ground for growth. I think it is more of a breeding ground for losing opportunities, hope and a view. The worries about my future are not worries like I have about the pair of shoes I will put on, they are concerns that I see in the peers around me. They are concerns that (up to a point) can be supported with news articles and even research.
Loneliness
The loneliness and need to see and speak to my friends in the ‘old way’ instead of in the digital way and with that the lack of people around me (who are not just my parents, sister and colleagues) is a loneliness I do not feel alone. It is almost ironic to hear that young people have so many friends, and still find a way to stay in digital contact and at the same time see articles that they feel so lonely. The emotional well-being is decreasing, and I now see the highs and lows in the emotional well-being of me and my friends very clearly. Loneliness is just one factor in someone’s well-being. I will not go into all aspects, I am not a researcher but a 21-year-old student. The aspects of education, labor and finance are aspects I deem important and these can be found at the breeding ground of the hopelessness I am currently experiencing.
Education
I have just talked about education and I notice that I both advantages and disadvantages of digital education. I could and would like to keep following my lectures from behind my computer screen, maybe I prefer them digitally. When it comes to working together and thus discussing things and doing business together (which makes us half of my education), I notice that we have to make a big sacrifice on the quality we can deliver and on developing our own skills. Of course, half an hour of meetings can be arranged digitally in no time and this may be something that will remain for us. When it comes to starting a project and receiving and giving feedback, I think it is disastrous to do it digitally. Normally we would sit together in a room and we can easily look at screens together, type and explain and visualize in all kinds of ways. A good brainstorming session is not possible for me digitally. It is also as good as not possible to ask a teacher for help. Not to mention the network we have to build and maintain. I would like to get into the media industry and realize all too well that a network is perhaps the most important thing besides your skills. That has essentially been put on pause. I share my concerns about the implementation of next year’s education with some of my classmates and friends.
Finances
In addition to these concerns, we also share financial concerns. In any other situation I would be in my own studio apartment in Dordrecht now, meanwhile I have temporarily moved back in with my parents. Of course that is nice, but my rent is not absent if I am absent. Even before I could read the reports on the growth in financial damage, I noticed it myself. I noticed it among my friends who lost their jobs either temporarily or permanently. I am also part of the group that temporarily lost work. I completely understand that if there is no work, it is also not possible to work, but with three flex contracts in one hand and a savings account in the other, you quickly need both hands to pay the rent.
‘As a young person it is not that difficult to get a job again, right? By the way, this is only temporary’, say that to the forty applications I sent out of which I only heard back from seven of them. Nobody has to guess the replies, they were all nos. It is also true that corona is temporary and in the end many consequences are temporary, but not all damage and consequences will be temporary if they are measured based on a human life. The consequences  will not be fixed overnight and the reports on the disappearing jobs are not exactly promising. Maybe it is my head and I think my brain does not always work well with me, but a mindset is not going to solve the financial damage and disappearance of jobs.
Do not just hear, listen, and do something
I always like the argument that if we as young people want and have so much to say that we have to let our voices be heard. I do not think it is a bad argument and everyone is and will continue to be entitled to the right of freedom of speech. I like to use that, and I do. When young people use their voice and it does not correspond well enough with the opinion of adults, the argument that ‘you do not know enough yet’ suddenly enters the room. First, we have to use our voice and then suddenly we do not know enough? Make a choice and stop reacting to young people, such as Greta Thunberg but also Coalition-Y. Using your vote goes beyond voting in elections. Voting is certainly right, but you can also make your voice be heard. I feel heard when I read a news report that half of the young people do not feel heard when it comes to the corona approach. That is why I consciously do research on certain matters, then get excited about certain matters and I am affiliated with Coalition-Y. They do not just hear me, they listen and offer a microphone. Our prime minister Mark Rutter asked for ideas from young people. He got those and now I am almost waiting for the moment he says that there were too many ideas and that will eventually do not do anything with them. This is my personal opinion and expectation and in this case I would very much like to be wrong. There are young people, we are visible, we now know that. Please do something with that. As a 21-year-old student who does not even study economics or journalism specifically, I can (partly) explain and substantiate my feelings and arguments, imagine what a part of my generation can do and know. Yes, young people want more, we want a prospect that goes beyond our student debt, the huge loss of jobs, the loss of time and the potentially impending financial crisis. You may think that some of our feelings and opinions are a bit exaggerated, it is your fundamental right, but please remember that everything we feel is real. It is real to us, it can be explained and it is as real as our prospect. I hope my feeling of hopelessness turns into a feeling of hope and joy that lasts longer than a few moments. Besides the hugs, I also miss those feelings.
i hope my feeling of hopelessness turns into a feeling of hope and joy that lasts longer than a few moments. Besides the hugs, I also miss those feelings.
from WordPress https://thepleasestandbychronicles.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/hopeless/
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devontroxell · 4 years
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Our Top 10 Social Media Engagement Hacks for 2020
Social media moves dizzyingly fast, but some fundamental concepts stay the same—like the importance of organic engagement and connecting with your audience.  In this article, I've rounded up 10 ideas to boost organic engagement, with examples from brands that are successfully adding followers and building communities online. That way, you can use these tips to start improving your own engagement right away.
Here are 10 hacks for improving your social media engagement in 2020:
Private Facebook groups
Games and giveaways
Video challenges
Gif conversations on Twitter
User-generated content
Virtual events
Collaborations and takeovers
Augmented reality lenses
Mixed media
More in-app actions
But first, let’s make sure we’re clear on why organic engagement is an important metric.
Why organic engagement matters on social media
From time to time, someone will announce that organic social media is over. It's all about the ads. And it is certainly true that the accuracy of targeted ads on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has increased.
 But at the same time, ad costs are rising, and, especially right now, more people are relying on digital media to stay in touch with friends and make meaningful connections.
TikTok was downloaded 87 million times just last month.
All of which means that genuine, organic engagement still matters. In fact, it matters more than ever. If you want your brand to succeed on social media, you need to build an active and authentic community which adds value for your followers.
10 social media engagement hacks in 2020
These engagement hacks are based on strategies and tools that I've used myself and found worked really well for different types of companies in many different countries. Take a look and see what inspires you!
1. Private Facebook groups
Facebook has been encouraging the use of groups for a while. While your main Facebook page is great for broadcasting information, groups allow you to create a focused, tight-knit community where people can share, discuss, and collaborate around your brand.
Anyone can request to join a Facebook group, but you can set up filter questions to make sure that your group is populated with your target audience.
I really encourage people to work with Facebook groups, because they're a workable way to build engagement for almost any business. There are broadly three categories of Facebook group run by brands:
Support groups: People share ideas, knowledge and advice.
Social groups: People share projects, make friends and organize events.
Insider groups: People get exclusive access to branded content, releases and events.
For example, this fashion brand runs a book club as a private Facebook social group.
Meanwhile, this SaaS brand runs a support group for its users. People compare notes about the application, share their work, and even suggest new features that they'd like to see. The group also uses Facebook's "Mentorship" feature, which connects experienced users with those who need a hand. Brand admins are very active in the group, so members feel that their engagement is valued.
Lastly, here's an example of an insider Facebook group, run by a brand. If you've ever taken a content marketing course from HubSpot, you probably got an invitation to join this group.
HubSpot uses it to run invite-only webinars and make product announcements. At the same time, they reap all the engagement benefits of running a social or support group.
2. Games and giveaways
It's strange to think how fast social media has evolved. In the beginning, we just shared written status updates. Then photographs took over. Then we discovered that video content got more engagement then photos.
So what's next? Interactive video, playable ads, and mini-games. Big brands (with budgets to match) are increasingly ambitious with the content they share: platform games, interactive video storylines and so on. Interactive content increases the time that followers spend on your social media profile, it has strong viral potential, and it can function as a painless method of lead generation.
The most recent example I've seen (via Mobile Marketer) is this game from Burberry, a mix of dressing up and classic platform game. It's surprisingly addictive.
The game is available on Burberry's own site, other shopping sites, the app WeChat and as an in-store activity. (If you want to know why that's significant, jump ahead to hack #10!) And when you finish playing, you get access to exclusive Burberry-branded gifs, so that you keep sharing online.
Obviously, this level of game design is beyond most content marketers' budgets. However, you can reproduce the ideas on a smaller and more feasible scale. Ready-made apps, game platforms for marketers and simple puzzles are rapidly becoming more popular.
Ideally, any branded game will tap into a dynamic that's already popular. For example, hidden objects games have been around for decades. If you use an off-the-shelf app, you just have to supply your own graphics and the game is ready to play.
Spin the wheel games are also popular, just like the classic TV show “Wheel of Fortune.” People love to play it, it's completely fool-proof, and you can run a major promotion without blowing the whole budget on rewards.
I suspect that interactive content has partly become more popular this year due to lockdown. We're all desperate for distractions, either for ourselves or for our reluctantly home-schooled children. Paradoxically, that's great news for brands—because it means that consumers will reward you for creativity and entertainment value.
3. Video challenges
You might not have taken part in a video challenge yet, but you've definitely heard of them.
The ice bucket challenge. The cinnamon challenge. The Renegade dance challenge.
Most video challenges share some key characteristics. They're quick and easy to do at home. They often have a signature soundtrack or phrase. And because they're filmed as short video clips, popular challenges tend to spill over from their original social platform and onto other social media. (This is great news in terms of viral reach.)
To create your own challenge, you just need a fun idea and an active audience. Don't create a challenge that’s too difficult, time-consuming, or derivative; if you borrow someone else's idea, you risk a backlash.
Here are a couple of examples to get you started. Remember the first few weeks of the 2020 lockdown, when everyone was suddenly making that coffee?
The Dalgona coffee challenge was inspired by a Korean TV show, took off on YouTube, and then spread to TikTok. And it was a gift to instant coffee manufacturers.
Like many challenges, Dalgona coffee emerged pretty much spontaneously. But some consumer brands have successfully engineered viral challenges, such as the NYX cosmetics challenge that publicized their new Butter Gloss Pop product.
Image source
Last time I checked, the hashtag had already reached 10.8 billion views. These challenges are designed to increase reach and brand awareness. They aren't ideal for lead generation or reaching a very focused audience, but they can help to bring your brand to a larger public.
4. Gif conversations on Twitter
Let's be blunt: I know of at least a few marketers who have given up on Twitter. But I think they're missing out. Twitter is still a key channel for customer service, customer feedback, and online discussion. It's also a great way to reach specific demographics, including B2B audiences.
If you want a quick engagement fix, then starting a gif thread can get you some attention on Twitter. This is where you pose a question, or give people a prompt, and ask them to respond with a single gif.
For some reason, this is especially popular with sports communities.
So why does this work? Well, like most things on social media, it's easy for people to join in. A frictionless experience is vital when you want people to engage with you.
Secondly, it mixes text with visual media and pop culture references. It taps into the media and style of communication that people are already using on Twitter, and gets plenty of attention in the process. You'll benefit from showing that you appreciate and understand online culture, especially if your brand skews to younger demographics.
5. Sharing user-generated content on brand hashtags
This trend has been around for a while, but it shows no signs of slowing down in 2020. The idea is simple, and similar to a video challenge: You create a hashtag that refers to your brand, and encourage people to share. But instead of asking people to complete a challenge or show a specific product, you invite them to share their unique experience of your brand.
Fashion and cosmetics brands are often at the forefront of consumer-focused social media, so it's no surprise that they're skilled at this. For example, the cult footwear brand Rothys uses the hashtag #rothysinthewild to collect photos and videos posted by their customers. All of that user-generated content is essentially free advertising, bringing Rothys to new audiences and building a mountain of social proof.
 The key to getting user-generated posts like this is to reward people who post. Whenever content pops up on your hashtag, reshare it to your own feed or add it to a dedicated Instagram highlight. Show people that you've noticed their contributions!
Once your hashtag is established and there's a regular stream of posts coming in, this is also a way to build community online. People who share posts with your brand will find each other through the hashtag. This solves a key problem for some social networks: While you can't create groups on Twitter or Instagram, you can develop a strong sense of community through hashtags.
6. Virtual events, chats, and networking
We've already touched on the idea of social media groups, or hashtag communities, around your brand. The natural next step is community events in real time: webinars, live chats, interactive livestreams, and networking.
The good news is that social media networks are rapidly introducing new features to support this. You can now broadcast live video on every single social platform, and most offer the option for viewers to share comments and reactions in real time.
Early in 2020, Facebook released Messenger Rooms for live video chats. This takes live broadcasts to the next level: you can invite a select group of people to fully participate in the conversation. When you create a room, you can choose to invite specific people or open the room to anyone. You can also schedule a room to "unlock" at a specific time or date, which is really useful for busy social media managers.
It's already available across Facebook Messenger and Instagram, with WhatsApp expected to follow soon.
Facebook is still playing around with the details of Rooms, but this is an app with huge potential. You can create private rooms within Facebook groups. Rooms also works on Instagram—just tap the video camera icon in the top-right of your private messages.
Most brand events in 2020 have, of necessity, been virtual. But even when life goes back to normal, don't lose touch with these virtual channels. Virtual events—or at least livestreaming in-person events—will help you reach people who can't attend due to distance, other commitments, or accessibility issues.
(And speaking of accessibility, follow these tips to make your video more accessible for people with hearing impairments. If you plan to use video regularly, invest in good software for automatic captions.)
7. Collaborations and takeovers
When you hear the word "collaboration," a lot of marketers' minds jump to expensive influencer campaigns. And those have their value—but, as always on social media, there are simpler and more affordable alternatives.
As we've seen, ordinary customers can bring huge benefits to your brand when they share content about your brand. So why not give them the chance to run your account for a day?
You can collaborate with customers, other local businesses, and complementary companies (for example, a brewery teaming up with a snack company). One great example of this is the Paperchase ambassador scheme. Every year, the stationery company selects a few university students to represent the brand. They get to run the brand's social media accounts for a day and try out new products.
You could team up with an influencer, customer or partner brand to run Twitter chats, Facebook Live, split-screen Instagram Lives or TikTok takeovers.
If you partner with someone who already has a sizeable audience, collaborations can increase your reach very rapidly. But they're also powerful because they create a sense of excitement for your regular followers. You can transform a weekly Q&A session into a sold-out event just by adding a new name and face into the mix.
8. Augmented reality lenses
Don't be fooled by the science fiction name: augmented reality is already an everyday part of our lives. If you've ever used an Instagram Story effect, you've used augmented reality.
With that said, augmented reality lenses are rapidly becoming more sophisticated—and both social networks and brands are waking up to the possibilities. Single Grain has pinpointed augmented reality as a major trend for Facebook Ads in 2020, while SnapChat is busy adding new features for brands and creators to design new AR lenses.
Many young creators, artists, and influencers are already playing around with these lens creation tools. They're easier to use than you think! If you're not sure where to start, speak to a graphic designer or try contacting a creator whose work you enjoy.
For example, you can search for AR effects by theme in your Instagram Story editor. Just tap the icon of a magnifying glass with stars on it. Each effect is credited to a creator who you can then track down and contact.
So what's the engagement value of these lenses?
Well, like every other hack mentioned here, they're something that social media users already enjoy interacting with. When you join in the fun, you have the chance to increase your audience and connect with followers by showing you care about the same things. Try creating AR filters that link to your followers' interests, let them play with your products, or even represent your values.
9. Mixed media
One of the things I love about social media is that people always find a way to make it work for them. Long before Twitter had a built-in camera, people were sharing video from other sites. And when Instagram users wished they could use their words more, people started sharing screencaps of Tweets and notes.
The only problem with this DIY version of social media is that it doesn't always look beautiful. You can save a lot of time on content creation by re-sharing content across different platforms—but you have to make sure your design is up to scratch.
My favorite app for this is Remix by Buffer. The design tools are very effective, and it's extremely fast to use. Start by putting in the URL of any website, tweet or even a Shopify product listing. The app then allows you to add backgrounds, change the image dimensions and pick a design that will look great.
 This is a fun way to share news, customer reviews or testimonials, or even just funny Tweets that caught your eye. If you decide to share content from other users, make sure you include proper credit. If it's your own content … fire away!
10. More in-app actions
Finally, let's take a second to think about the future of social media. What's coming next?
Judging from the features that social networks are putting out, the goal is to do more and more within social media. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have all released new in-app shopping features during 2020. Instagram now offers Story stickers to buy gift cards, make charitable donations and order food. SnapChat has announced their new SnapChat Minis scheme, which gives brands the power to build mini-apps on the platform.
The inspiration for many of these ideas is the Chinese social media giant, WeChat. You can pretty much live your entire life inside WeChat, including messaging, social sharing, shopping, ordering food, paying bills, and booking appointments.
It remains to be seen whether this approach will work for Western audiences. While in-app features offer plenty of convenience, they also involve handing over a lot more data to the social media giants. So finding the right balance—and keeping your data policies transparent, accurate and up to date—will be key.
Start improving your social media engagement today
The key to success on social media is to keep on posting, engaging, and trying out new ideas. By this time next year, we'll probably have 10 new social media engagement hacks to share! But in the meantime, I'd love to hear if you've tried out any of these engagement hacks and what results you saw
About the author
Corinna Keefe is a freelance writer who specializes in digital marketing, tech and social media. 
Our Top 10 Social Media Engagement Hacks for 2020 published first on https://wabusinessapi.tumblr.com/
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jesusvasser · 5 years
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Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe
For roughly 130 years humans have been in charge of the steering wheels, throttles, and brakes in our roadgoing vehicles; it’s all been up to us—for better and for worse. Today, though, the future envisioned as long ago as the 1939 World’s Fair is nearly here. Computers are poised to pilot us wherever we want to go with no human intervention necessary. In fact, in a few select areas they’re already doing just that.
The implications are enormous. What does the arrival of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) mean for the future of transportation? And, crucially for driving enthusiasts like us, will the conventional human-driven automobile survive? The answers are as amazing as they are thought-provoking.
The Promise. And the Pizza.
“Safety is first and foremost,” says Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at General Motors, and a prime consultant on Google’s self-driving-car project (now dubbed Waymo, for “a new way forward in mobility”) since 2011. “Traffic-safety experts believe we can reduce 90 percent of crashes using CAVs. Given that 1.3 million people die in autos worldwide every year, that’s 1 million people. Divide that by 365 days, and that’s 3,000 lives per day. I always say in my stump speeches, ‘If we can get to the full safety potential of CAVs one day earlier, we’re going to save 3,000 lives.’ The biggest risk is not getting to that future as soon as we can.”
Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at GM, and author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car.
Burns is arguably the world’s leading expert on CAVs. In his riveting new book, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—which reads like a tech thriller; it’s available now new or used on Amazon—he notes that CAVs were largely spurred into existence after 9/11, when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) investigated the feasibility of driverless military vehicles by sponsoring the Grand Challenge, an event held to see if a CAV could complete a 150-mile race in California’s Mojave Desert with a million-dollar prize on the line. (None finished the first year; five robots completed the second year’s 132-mile event.)
Yet it was an altogether different motivation, Burns says, that inspired the first real-world automated vehicle: hunger. For pizza. In 2008, the Discovery Channel program “Prototype This!” approached self-driving-car engineer Anthony Levandowski (who was working on Google’s Street View camera tech at the time) with a challenge: build an automated vehicle that would deliver a pizza from San Francisco, over the Oakland Bay Bridge, and all the way to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. (The Discovery Channel offices there were considered too far away for most takeout joints.) Levandowski’s team added lidar (laser-based radar), radar, and other automated tech to a Toyota Prius and hacked its drive-by-wire system, and in mere weeks “Pribot” successfully completed the mission. The Discovery producers got their North Beach Pizza. Without a delivery driver.
Google co-founder Larry Page—who as a student at the University of Michigan suffered through freezing winters waiting for campus buses to arrive—took notice of the remarkable pizza car. He also realized self-driving vehicles could cure the bus-waiting problem—and much more. As Burns notes in his book, Page told a colleague: “If this business succeeds, it could be bigger than Google. Which means, even if there’s just a 10 percent chance of this succeeding, it’s worth the investment.” Thus was born Google’s Chauffeur project, now Waymo.
“Imagine, I have my own autonomous vehicle,” says Burns from his home in bucolic Franklin, Michigan. “I ride to my office in Detroit, where my vehicle drops me off at the door. It’s then intelligent enough to go find a place to stage—I call it staging, not parking. Maybe while there it’s re-energizing its batteries, or getting some maintenance, or being cleaned. During the day I can even dispatch it to get my kids at school and take them to soccer practice. Then, at the end of the day, my vehicle stops by a Chinese restaurant, picks up my takeout order, then picks me up at my office door and drives me home. Actually, getting the takeout brings up one of the best potential time-savers when using an AV: It’s not that you don’t have to pay attention when driving; it’s that you don’t have to take the trip at all.”
78% of Americans believe that AVs could make their lives easier
CAVs also offer the promise of dramatically reducing transportation costs. “Today, cars cost about $1.50 per mile to operate, including depreciation, fuel, financing, parking, and human time,” Burns says. “I think we’re going to see a future where that drops to 25 cents a mile or less. Your payment will only be how much time you had the vehicle, and how many miles.”
Indeed, the potential economic benefits to society as a whole are staggering. “Instead of driving, it will be Transportation as a Service,” Burns says. “We’ll be selling trips and experiences instead of vehicles and gas and insurance. As Uber and Lyft are doing with ride-sharing, you’ll hail a CAV when you need it, or perhaps you’ll subscribe to a service that provides you with your own vehicle but handles all maintenance, refueling, and parking. If we get to that 25-cents-per-mile cost, and given that Americans drive 3 trillion miles per year, that’s a potential savings of $4 trillion—about the annual budget of the U.S. government. Think if consumers spent that money on something else besides their cars.”
Dave Cole, former director of the UM’s Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (OSAT) and one of the founders of Auto Harvest, an intellectual property portal for the auto industry, notes the many secondary benefits to CAVs. “Obviously, when [crashes decrease], you’ll see a huge reduction in insurance costs,” he says. “Instead of owning a car you use only 20 to 40 minutes a day, you’ll buy access to a car that gets used 20 hours a day by multiple people, so that’s big savings. You’ll also see a vast reduction in the complexity of hospital ER cases because the crashes won’t occur. And of course sustainability—climate change, air pollution, land use, all those are going to benefit. Systems thinking is really important when looking at autonomous vehicles.”
Burns says Wall Street is beginning to see the “profound opportunities” of CAVs. “Right now, most automakers make between $1,500 and $5,000 per vehicle. Now, if you take a CAV with a 300,000-mile life, then you make 10 cents a mile on it, that’s $30,000 profit. I really think companies are going to want to go in this direction once it’s proven.”
Obstacles of Course
The inertia ingrained into the auto industry is massive. “When I’d mention self-driving cars to Detroit auto executives,” Burns says, “they’d say, ‘It’s never going to happen. People like driving.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah. But there were also people who liked to ride horses.’” Burns has a warning for the non-believers: “Companies that stick to the 130-year-old paradigm of conventional roadway vehicles are going to be punished pretty aggressively by Wall Street.”
The technology behind CAVs doesn’t appear to be a show-stopper, but there are sticking points. “Don’t be fooled by some of the hype that the tech is ready,” says Richard Wallace, director of transportation systems analysis for the Center for Automotive Research. “Not all of the hurdles still to be overcome are related to artificial intelligence-related driving. There’s cyber-security. It would be crazy to have drivers take a nap in the back seat without that figured out. And the AI has to be far better than drivers today. Right now humans have one fatal crash every 100 million miles. That’s 99.99 percent safe, but that’s not good enough. For CAVs, we need 99.999999999 percent, a lot of digits. Near-perfection.” (Read more about the state of the autonomous art today.)
Mcity, a 32-acre research park in Ann Arbor, serves as a hub where industry, government, and academia work together on future mobility systems. Huei Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and director of Mcity, says the technology will get where it needs to be, but there’s a lot to consider before that happens. “When you’re talking about a Level 4 vehicle, fully autonomous within defined areas and conditions, selling to John Doe right now is not a good idea,” he says. “You need to keep the vehicle’s cameras clean, the lidar functional, calibrate the systems. It’s much better to operate a shared, managed vehicle that’s geofenced into a certain area, certain weather conditions, and certain speeds than to shoot for Level 5, which is fully autonomous anywhere, anytime. Level 5 may never happen. You’d have to have a vehicle as comfortable with kangaroos in Australia as sandstorms in Saudi Arabia.”
Wallace notes other bumps in the automated road. “We certainly don’t have a comprehensive regulatory and legislative approach at this time,” he says (see sidebar). “Then there’s public acceptance. Half to two-thirds of people say they’re interested in driverless cars, but then you have the self-driving Uber fatality in Arizona, and the acceptance—particularly among young people—goes way down. Also, though people are curious, they really don’t want to give up their steering wheels. Everyone thinks the other guy is the bad driver.”
Peng sees two final major challenges. “Reliability has to be automotive-grade,” he says. “Ten years, 100,000 miles. That’s the target. Right now, CAVs fail too frequently. And then there’s the talent issue. Do we have the workforce to get everything done? We’re going to need thousands of engineers who know robotics, cyber security, computer programming. If we don’t have enough new students in those fields, progress will be held back.”
Grounds for Improvement
“This isn’t your grandfather’s proving grounds,” says John Maddox, former president and CEO of the American Center for Mobility (ACM), a 500-acre CAV-testing facility opened in December 2017 at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan—site of the former bomber plant Henry Ford built during World War II to produce such aircraft as the B-24 Liberator. Created in partnership with the state of Michigan, automakers, and other private entities, the ACM is available for lease to companies by the day, the month, or even at the same time a rival is testing on another area of the track.
Waymo’s Level 4 Early Rider Chrysler Pacificas are already performing taxi duties in Phoenix. Since 2009, its test fleet has accumulated more than 10 million driving miles in cities from Kirkland, Washington, to Atlanta.
“[The ACM] works side by side with OEMs and other industries from all over the world,” Maddox says. “But unlike conventional proving grounds, which are really built for accelerated wear or testing fuel economy, the ACM is designed to look like the real world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to test decision-making or other tech features reliably and repeatedly.”
In fact, the ACM convinced the state of Michigan to allow the facility to swallow up portions of several nearby, lightly used public roads—including two of the first triple-decker bridges ever built in the U.S. Still, much of the ACM lies unfinished as of last summer; garages, roadways, intersections are all under construction. “We may always be building,” Maddox says with a laugh. “Right now we’re building what testers need, but they learn something new every day, and they come to us and ask, ‘What if we just had a yada yada yada?’ And we can reconfigure or build new track as we go along.”
Test facilities at the American Center for Mobility mimic real-world driving conditions—and are constantly being reimagined to meet the demands of rapidly evolving CAV technologies.
Collaboration is a huge part of the ACM, Maddox adds. “Maybe an OEM wants to work with a cellphone maker, a traffic-control company like Siemens, and a sim company. They can have the place to themselves, all four companies working together. The thing is, an automaker like, say, Ford, would never have AT&T onto its own facility, which would compromise the confidentiality of their products. At the ACM they don’t have to worry about that.”
Bot Wheels
Are computers eventually going to push humans out of the driver’s seat? “I’ve got a bunch of classic muscle cars and trucks, and I’m never giving those up,” Maddox says. “In my and my kids’ and my grandkids’ lifetimes, I believe we’ll have human-driven vehicles.”
Burns agrees. “When the car became popular, horses didn’t go away,” he observes. “Enthusiasts will always pursue their hobbies. But most of the time, we’re just talking about transportation. The drive from Detroit to Chicago on I-94—that’s not fun. I’d much rather have my car do that.”
A visualization of what is simultaneously “seen” by Waymo’s automated vehicle and its human passenger when encountering a stopped school bus.
Wallace has a different take. “You look at Waymo, and they’re not working on human assistance,” he says. “They’re trying to jump all the way to Level 4 or Level 5, no human interaction at all. But I’m perplexed there isn’t more attention given to making people better drivers with reinforcing technology instead of taking the human out of the loop. Maybe we don’t need Level 4 or 5—maybe collaborative driving is a better solution. Also, in rural areas there’s no benefit to a ride-sharing automated vehicle. There’s nobody else out there. In 50 years … maybe. Then our [race] tracks will be the horse farms of the future where you can still take your human-driven car out to play.”
Peng thinks we could wind up with the best of both worlds. “When I’m tired or if I drink, then the car can drive,” he says. “Other times I want to enjoy driving myself. Maybe even Ferrari will one day make an automated vehicle. You know they will tune it to be fast.”
The post Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe appeared first on Automobile Magazine.
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eddiejpoplar · 5 years
Text
Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe
For roughly 130 years humans have been in charge of the steering wheels, throttles, and brakes in our roadgoing vehicles; it’s all been up to us—for better and for worse. Today, though, the future envisioned as long ago as the 1939 World’s Fair is nearly here. Computers are poised to pilot us wherever we want to go with no human intervention necessary. In fact, in a few select areas they’re already doing just that.
The implications are enormous. What does the arrival of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) mean for the future of transportation? And, crucially for driving enthusiasts like us, will the conventional human-driven automobile survive? The answers are as amazing as they are thought-provoking.
The Promise. And the Pizza.
“Safety is first and foremost,” says Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at General Motors, and a prime consultant on Google’s self-driving-car project (now dubbed Waymo, for “a new way forward in mobility”) since 2011. “Traffic-safety experts believe we can reduce 90 percent of crashes using CAVs. Given that 1.3 million people die in autos worldwide every year, that’s 1 million people. Divide that by 365 days, and that’s 3,000 lives per day. I always say in my stump speeches, ‘If we can get to the full safety potential of CAVs one day earlier, we’re going to save 3,000 lives.’ The biggest risk is not getting to that future as soon as we can.”
Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at GM, and author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car.
Burns is arguably the world’s leading expert on CAVs. In his riveting new book, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—which reads like a tech thriller; it’s available now new or used on Amazon—he notes that CAVs were largely spurred into existence after 9/11, when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) investigated the feasibility of driverless military vehicles by sponsoring the Grand Challenge, an event held to see if a CAV could complete a 150-mile race in California’s Mojave Desert with a million-dollar prize on the line. (None finished the first year; five robots completed the second year’s 132-mile event.)
Yet it was an altogether different motivation, Burns says, that inspired the first real-world automated vehicle: hunger. For pizza. In 2008, the Discovery Channel program “Prototype This!” approached self-driving-car engineer Anthony Levandowski (who was working on Google’s Street View camera tech at the time) with a challenge: build an automated vehicle that would deliver a pizza from San Francisco, over the Oakland Bay Bridge, and all the way to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. (The Discovery Channel offices there were considered too far away for most takeout joints.) Levandowski’s team added lidar (laser-based radar), radar, and other automated tech to a Toyota Prius and hacked its drive-by-wire system, and in mere weeks “Pribot” successfully completed the mission. The Discovery producers got their North Beach Pizza. Without a delivery driver.
Google co-founder Larry Page—who as a student at the University of Michigan suffered through freezing winters waiting for campus buses to arrive—took notice of the remarkable pizza car. He also realized self-driving vehicles could cure the bus-waiting problem—and much more. As Burns notes in his book, Page told a colleague: “If this business succeeds, it could be bigger than Google. Which means, even if there’s just a 10 percent chance of this succeeding, it’s worth the investment.” Thus was born Google’s Chauffeur project, now Waymo.
“Imagine, I have my own autonomous vehicle,” says Burns from his home in bucolic Franklin, Michigan. “I ride to my office in Detroit, where my vehicle drops me off at the door. It’s then intelligent enough to go find a place to stage—I call it staging, not parking. Maybe while there it’s re-energizing its batteries, or getting some maintenance, or being cleaned. During the day I can even dispatch it to get my kids at school and take them to soccer practice. Then, at the end of the day, my vehicle stops by a Chinese restaurant, picks up my takeout order, then picks me up at my office door and drives me home. Actually, getting the takeout brings up one of the best potential time-savers when using an AV: It’s not that you don’t have to pay attention when driving; it’s that you don’t have to take the trip at all.”
78% of Americans believe that AVs could make their lives easier
CAVs also offer the promise of dramatically reducing transportation costs. “Today, cars cost about $1.50 per mile to operate, including depreciation, fuel, financing, parking, and human time,” Burns says. “I think we’re going to see a future where that drops to 25 cents a mile or less. Your payment will only be how much time you had the vehicle, and how many miles.”
Indeed, the potential economic benefits to society as a whole are staggering. “Instead of driving, it will be Transportation as a Service,” Burns says. “We’ll be selling trips and experiences instead of vehicles and gas and insurance. As Uber and Lyft are doing with ride-sharing, you’ll hail a CAV when you need it, or perhaps you’ll subscribe to a service that provides you with your own vehicle but handles all maintenance, refueling, and parking. If we get to that 25-cents-per-mile cost, and given that Americans drive 3 trillion miles per year, that’s a potential savings of $4 trillion—about the annual budget of the U.S. government. Think if consumers spent that money on something else besides their cars.”
Dave Cole, former director of the UM’s Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (OSAT) and one of the founders of Auto Harvest, an intellectual property portal for the auto industry, notes the many secondary benefits to CAVs. “Obviously, when [crashes decrease], you’ll see a huge reduction in insurance costs,” he says. “Instead of owning a car you use only 20 to 40 minutes a day, you’ll buy access to a car that gets used 20 hours a day by multiple people, so that’s big savings. You’ll also see a vast reduction in the complexity of hospital ER cases because the crashes won’t occur. And of course sustainability—climate change, air pollution, land use, all those are going to benefit. Systems thinking is really important when looking at autonomous vehicles.”
Burns says Wall Street is beginning to see the “profound opportunities” of CAVs. “Right now, most automakers make between $1,500 and $5,000 per vehicle. Now, if you take a CAV with a 300,000-mile life, then you make 10 cents a mile on it, that’s $30,000 profit. I really think companies are going to want to go in this direction once it’s proven.”
Obstacles of Course
The inertia ingrained into the auto industry is massive. “When I’d mention self-driving cars to Detroit auto executives,” Burns says, “they’d say, ‘It’s never going to happen. People like driving.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah. But there were also people who liked to ride horses.’” Burns has a warning for the non-believers: “Companies that stick to the 130-year-old paradigm of conventional roadway vehicles are going to be punished pretty aggressively by Wall Street.”
The technology behind CAVs doesn’t appear to be a show-stopper, but there are sticking points. “Don’t be fooled by some of the hype that the tech is ready,” says Richard Wallace, director of transportation systems analysis for the Center for Automotive Research. “Not all of the hurdles still to be overcome are related to artificial intelligence-related driving. There’s cyber-security. It would be crazy to have drivers take a nap in the back seat without that figured out. And the AI has to be far better than drivers today. Right now humans have one fatal crash every 100 million miles. That’s 99.99 percent safe, but that’s not good enough. For CAVs, we need 99.999999999 percent, a lot of digits. Near-perfection.” (Read more about the state of the autonomous art today.)
Mcity, a 32-acre research park in Ann Arbor, serves as a hub where industry, government, and academia work together on future mobility systems. Huei Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and director of Mcity, says the technology will get where it needs to be, but there’s a lot to consider before that happens. “When you’re talking about a Level 4 vehicle, fully autonomous within defined areas and conditions, selling to John Doe right now is not a good idea,” he says. “You need to keep the vehicle’s cameras clean, the lidar functional, calibrate the systems. It’s much better to operate a shared, managed vehicle that’s geofenced into a certain area, certain weather conditions, and certain speeds than to shoot for Level 5, which is fully autonomous anywhere, anytime. Level 5 may never happen. You’d have to have a vehicle as comfortable with kangaroos in Australia as sandstorms in Saudi Arabia.”
Wallace notes other bumps in the automated road. “We certainly don’t have a comprehensive regulatory and legislative approach at this time,” he says (see sidebar). “Then there’s public acceptance. Half to two-thirds of people say they’re interested in driverless cars, but then you have the self-driving Uber fatality in Arizona, and the acceptance—particularly among young people—goes way down. Also, though people are curious, they really don’t want to give up their steering wheels. Everyone thinks the other guy is the bad driver.”
Peng sees two final major challenges. “Reliability has to be automotive-grade,” he says. “Ten years, 100,000 miles. That’s the target. Right now, CAVs fail too frequently. And then there’s the talent issue. Do we have the workforce to get everything done? We’re going to need thousands of engineers who know robotics, cyber security, computer programming. If we don’t have enough new students in those fields, progress will be held back.”
Grounds for Improvement
“This isn’t your grandfather’s proving grounds,” says John Maddox, former president and CEO of the American Center for Mobility (ACM), a 500-acre CAV-testing facility opened in December 2017 at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan—site of the former bomber plant Henry Ford built during World War II to produce such aircraft as the B-24 Liberator. Created in partnership with the state of Michigan, automakers, and other private entities, the ACM is available for lease to companies by the day, the month, or even at the same time a rival is testing on another area of the track.
Waymo’s Level 4 Early Rider Chrysler Pacificas are already performing taxi duties in Phoenix. Since 2009, its test fleet has accumulated more than 10 million driving miles in cities from Kirkland, Washington, to Atlanta.
“[The ACM] works side by side with OEMs and other industries from all over the world,” Maddox says. “But unlike conventional proving grounds, which are really built for accelerated wear or testing fuel economy, the ACM is designed to look like the real world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to test decision-making or other tech features reliably and repeatedly.”
In fact, the ACM convinced the state of Michigan to allow the facility to swallow up portions of several nearby, lightly used public roads—including two of the first triple-decker bridges ever built in the U.S. Still, much of the ACM lies unfinished as of last summer; garages, roadways, intersections are all under construction. “We may always be building,” Maddox says with a laugh. “Right now we’re building what testers need, but they learn something new every day, and they come to us and ask, ‘What if we just had a yada yada yada?’ And we can reconfigure or build new track as we go along.”
Test facilities at the American Center for Mobility mimic real-world driving conditions—and are constantly being reimagined to meet the demands of rapidly evolving CAV technologies.
Collaboration is a huge part of the ACM, Maddox adds. “Maybe an OEM wants to work with a cellphone maker, a traffic-control company like Siemens, and a sim company. They can have the place to themselves, all four companies working together. The thing is, an automaker like, say, Ford, would never have AT&T onto its own facility, which would compromise the confidentiality of their products. At the ACM they don’t have to worry about that.”
Bot Wheels
Are computers eventually going to push humans out of the driver’s seat? “I’ve got a bunch of classic muscle cars and trucks, and I’m never giving those up,” Maddox says. “In my and my kids’ and my grandkids’ lifetimes, I believe we’ll have human-driven vehicles.”
Burns agrees. “When the car became popular, horses didn’t go away,” he observes. “Enthusiasts will always pursue their hobbies. But most of the time, we’re just talking about transportation. The drive from Detroit to Chicago on I-94—that’s not fun. I’d much rather have my car do that.”
A visualization of what is simultaneously “seen” by Waymo’s automated vehicle and its human passenger when encountering a stopped school bus.
Wallace has a different take. “You look at Waymo, and they’re not working on human assistance,” he says. “They’re trying to jump all the way to Level 4 or Level 5, no human interaction at all. But I’m perplexed there isn’t more attention given to making people better drivers with reinforcing technology instead of taking the human out of the loop. Maybe we don’t need Level 4 or 5—maybe collaborative driving is a better solution. Also, in rural areas there’s no benefit to a ride-sharing automated vehicle. There’s nobody else out there. In 50 years … maybe. Then our [race] tracks will be the horse farms of the future where you can still take your human-driven car out to play.”
Peng thinks we could wind up with the best of both worlds. “When I’m tired or if I drink, then the car can drive,” he says. “Other times I want to enjoy driving myself. Maybe even Ferrari will one day make an automated vehicle. You know they will tune it to be fast.”
The post Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe appeared first on Automobile Magazine.
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jonathanbelloblog · 5 years
Text
Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe
For roughly 130 years humans have been in charge of the steering wheels, throttles, and brakes in our roadgoing vehicles; it’s all been up to us—for better and for worse. Today, though, the future envisioned as long ago as the 1939 World’s Fair is nearly here. Computers are poised to pilot us wherever we want to go with no human intervention necessary. In fact, in a few select areas they’re already doing just that.
The implications are enormous. What does the arrival of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) mean for the future of transportation? And, crucially for driving enthusiasts like us, will the conventional human-driven automobile survive? The answers are as amazing as they are thought-provoking.
The Promise. And the Pizza.
“Safety is first and foremost,” says Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at General Motors, and a prime consultant on Google’s self-driving-car project (now dubbed Waymo, for “a new way forward in mobility”) since 2011. “Traffic-safety experts believe we can reduce 90 percent of crashes using CAVs. Given that 1.3 million people die in autos worldwide every year, that’s 1 million people. Divide that by 365 days, and that’s 3,000 lives per day. I always say in my stump speeches, ‘If we can get to the full safety potential of CAVs one day earlier, we’re going to save 3,000 lives.’ The biggest risk is not getting to that future as soon as we can.”
Lawrence D. Burns, Ph.D., former chief of R&D at GM, and author of Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car.
Burns is arguably the world’s leading expert on CAVs. In his riveting new book, Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—which reads like a tech thriller; it’s available now new or used on Amazon—he notes that CAVs were largely spurred into existence after 9/11, when the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) investigated the feasibility of driverless military vehicles by sponsoring the Grand Challenge, an event held to see if a CAV could complete a 150-mile race in California’s Mojave Desert with a million-dollar prize on the line. (None finished the first year; five robots completed the second year’s 132-mile event.)
Yet it was an altogether different motivation, Burns says, that inspired the first real-world automated vehicle: hunger. For pizza. In 2008, the Discovery Channel program “Prototype This!” approached self-driving-car engineer Anthony Levandowski (who was working on Google’s Street View camera tech at the time) with a challenge: build an automated vehicle that would deliver a pizza from San Francisco, over the Oakland Bay Bridge, and all the way to Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. (The Discovery Channel offices there were considered too far away for most takeout joints.) Levandowski’s team added lidar (laser-based radar), radar, and other automated tech to a Toyota Prius and hacked its drive-by-wire system, and in mere weeks “Pribot” successfully completed the mission. The Discovery producers got their North Beach Pizza. Without a delivery driver.
Google co-founder Larry Page—who as a student at the University of Michigan suffered through freezing winters waiting for campus buses to arrive—took notice of the remarkable pizza car. He also realized self-driving vehicles could cure the bus-waiting problem—and much more. As Burns notes in his book, Page told a colleague: “If this business succeeds, it could be bigger than Google. Which means, even if there’s just a 10 percent chance of this succeeding, it’s worth the investment.” Thus was born Google’s Chauffeur project, now Waymo.
“Imagine, I have my own autonomous vehicle,” says Burns from his home in bucolic Franklin, Michigan. “I ride to my office in Detroit, where my vehicle drops me off at the door. It’s then intelligent enough to go find a place to stage—I call it staging, not parking. Maybe while there it’s re-energizing its batteries, or getting some maintenance, or being cleaned. During the day I can even dispatch it to get my kids at school and take them to soccer practice. Then, at the end of the day, my vehicle stops by a Chinese restaurant, picks up my takeout order, then picks me up at my office door and drives me home. Actually, getting the takeout brings up one of the best potential time-savers when using an AV: It’s not that you don’t have to pay attention when driving; it’s that you don’t have to take the trip at all.”
78% of Americans believe that AVs could make their lives easier
CAVs also offer the promise of dramatically reducing transportation costs. “Today, cars cost about $1.50 per mile to operate, including depreciation, fuel, financing, parking, and human time,” Burns says. “I think we’re going to see a future where that drops to 25 cents a mile or less. Your payment will only be how much time you had the vehicle, and how many miles.”
Indeed, the potential economic benefits to society as a whole are staggering. “Instead of driving, it will be Transportation as a Service,” Burns says. “We’ll be selling trips and experiences instead of vehicles and gas and insurance. As Uber and Lyft are doing with ride-sharing, you’ll hail a CAV when you need it, or perhaps you’ll subscribe to a service that provides you with your own vehicle but handles all maintenance, refueling, and parking. If we get to that 25-cents-per-mile cost, and given that Americans drive 3 trillion miles per year, that’s a potential savings of $4 trillion—about the annual budget of the U.S. government. Think if consumers spent that money on something else besides their cars.”
Dave Cole, former director of the UM’s Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (OSAT) and one of the founders of Auto Harvest, an intellectual property portal for the auto industry, notes the many secondary benefits to CAVs. “Obviously, when [crashes decrease], you’ll see a huge reduction in insurance costs,” he says. “Instead of owning a car you use only 20 to 40 minutes a day, you’ll buy access to a car that gets used 20 hours a day by multiple people, so that’s big savings. You’ll also see a vast reduction in the complexity of hospital ER cases because the crashes won’t occur. And of course sustainability—climate change, air pollution, land use, all those are going to benefit. Systems thinking is really important when looking at autonomous vehicles.”
Burns says Wall Street is beginning to see the “profound opportunities” of CAVs. “Right now, most automakers make between $1,500 and $5,000 per vehicle. Now, if you take a CAV with a 300,000-mile life, then you make 10 cents a mile on it, that’s $30,000 profit. I really think companies are going to want to go in this direction once it’s proven.”
Obstacles of Course
The inertia ingrained into the auto industry is massive. “When I’d mention self-driving cars to Detroit auto executives,” Burns says, “they’d say, ‘It’s never going to happen. People like driving.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah. But there were also people who liked to ride horses.’” Burns has a warning for the non-believers: “Companies that stick to the 130-year-old paradigm of conventional roadway vehicles are going to be punished pretty aggressively by Wall Street.”
The technology behind CAVs doesn’t appear to be a show-stopper, but there are sticking points. “Don’t be fooled by some of the hype that the tech is ready,” says Richard Wallace, director of transportation systems analysis for the Center for Automotive Research. “Not all of the hurdles still to be overcome are related to artificial intelligence-related driving. There’s cyber-security. It would be crazy to have drivers take a nap in the back seat without that figured out. And the AI has to be far better than drivers today. Right now humans have one fatal crash every 100 million miles. That’s 99.99 percent safe, but that’s not good enough. For CAVs, we need 99.999999999 percent, a lot of digits. Near-perfection.” (Read more about the state of the autonomous art today.)
Mcity, a 32-acre research park in Ann Arbor, serves as a hub where industry, government, and academia work together on future mobility systems. Huei Peng, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and director of Mcity, says the technology will get where it needs to be, but there’s a lot to consider before that happens. “When you’re talking about a Level 4 vehicle, fully autonomous within defined areas and conditions, selling to John Doe right now is not a good idea,” he says. “You need to keep the vehicle’s cameras clean, the lidar functional, calibrate the systems. It’s much better to operate a shared, managed vehicle that’s geofenced into a certain area, certain weather conditions, and certain speeds than to shoot for Level 5, which is fully autonomous anywhere, anytime. Level 5 may never happen. You’d have to have a vehicle as comfortable with kangaroos in Australia as sandstorms in Saudi Arabia.”
Wallace notes other bumps in the automated road. “We certainly don’t have a comprehensive regulatory and legislative approach at this time,” he says (see sidebar). “Then there’s public acceptance. Half to two-thirds of people say they’re interested in driverless cars, but then you have the self-driving Uber fatality in Arizona, and the acceptance—particularly among young people—goes way down. Also, though people are curious, they really don’t want to give up their steering wheels. Everyone thinks the other guy is the bad driver.”
Peng sees two final major challenges. “Reliability has to be automotive-grade,” he says. “Ten years, 100,000 miles. That’s the target. Right now, CAVs fail too frequently. And then there’s the talent issue. Do we have the workforce to get everything done? We’re going to need thousands of engineers who know robotics, cyber security, computer programming. If we don’t have enough new students in those fields, progress will be held back.”
Grounds for Improvement
“This isn’t your grandfather’s proving grounds,” says John Maddox, former president and CEO of the American Center for Mobility (ACM), a 500-acre CAV-testing facility opened in December 2017 at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan—site of the former bomber plant Henry Ford built during World War II to produce such aircraft as the B-24 Liberator. Created in partnership with the state of Michigan, automakers, and other private entities, the ACM is available for lease to companies by the day, the month, or even at the same time a rival is testing on another area of the track.
Waymo’s Level 4 Early Rider Chrysler Pacificas are already performing taxi duties in Phoenix. Since 2009, its test fleet has accumulated more than 10 million driving miles in cities from Kirkland, Washington, to Atlanta.
“[The ACM] works side by side with OEMs and other industries from all over the world,” Maddox says. “But unlike conventional proving grounds, which are really built for accelerated wear or testing fuel economy, the ACM is designed to look like the real world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to test decision-making or other tech features reliably and repeatedly.”
In fact, the ACM convinced the state of Michigan to allow the facility to swallow up portions of several nearby, lightly used public roads—including two of the first triple-decker bridges ever built in the U.S. Still, much of the ACM lies unfinished as of last summer; garages, roadways, intersections are all under construction. “We may always be building,” Maddox says with a laugh. “Right now we’re building what testers need, but they learn something new every day, and they come to us and ask, ‘What if we just had a yada yada yada?’ And we can reconfigure or build new track as we go along.”
Test facilities at the American Center for Mobility mimic real-world driving conditions—and are constantly being reimagined to meet the demands of rapidly evolving CAV technologies.
Collaboration is a huge part of the ACM, Maddox adds. “Maybe an OEM wants to work with a cellphone maker, a traffic-control company like Siemens, and a sim company. They can have the place to themselves, all four companies working together. The thing is, an automaker like, say, Ford, would never have AT&T onto its own facility, which would compromise the confidentiality of their products. At the ACM they don’t have to worry about that.”
Bot Wheels
Are computers eventually going to push humans out of the driver’s seat? “I’ve got a bunch of classic muscle cars and trucks, and I’m never giving those up,” Maddox says. “In my and my kids’ and my grandkids’ lifetimes, I believe we’ll have human-driven vehicles.”
Burns agrees. “When the car became popular, horses didn’t go away,” he observes. “Enthusiasts will always pursue their hobbies. But most of the time, we’re just talking about transportation. The drive from Detroit to Chicago on I-94—that’s not fun. I’d much rather have my car do that.”
A visualization of what is simultaneously “seen” by Waymo’s automated vehicle and its human passenger when encountering a stopped school bus.
Wallace has a different take. “You look at Waymo, and they’re not working on human assistance,” he says. “They’re trying to jump all the way to Level 4 or Level 5, no human interaction at all. But I’m perplexed there isn’t more attention given to making people better drivers with reinforcing technology instead of taking the human out of the loop. Maybe we don’t need Level 4 or 5—maybe collaborative driving is a better solution. Also, in rural areas there’s no benefit to a ride-sharing automated vehicle. There’s nobody else out there. In 50 years … maybe. Then our [race] tracks will be the horse farms of the future where you can still take your human-driven car out to play.”
Peng thinks we could wind up with the best of both worlds. “When I’m tired or if I drink, then the car can drive,” he says. “Other times I want to enjoy driving myself. Maybe even Ferrari will one day make an automated vehicle. You know they will tune it to be fast.”
The post Fully Automated Vehicles Are Likely Further Away than Some Would Have You Believe appeared first on Automobile Magazine.
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kelsusit · 6 years
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Pc Workstation Ergonomics
UTPB Library Pc Workstation Use Guidelines
Regardless of whether it is your first time getting a computer or acquiring one as a replacement to the old, it is often beneficial to have a small expertise on what is being sold in the market these days. Note: If your software does not support GPU rendering, use the alternate components beneath these components to get better CPU rendering overall performance. When trains get to Aquia Landing, they will spot the automobiles according the “When Empty return to” directions on the bill. A File Server Resource Manager XML configuration file or import-export file is corrupted. Desktop Computer official website customers can surf the Web, play media files, e-mail, play games, chat and video conference. You can place the installation files on a USB or Neighborhood Disk and start the and set up windows 7. (I suggest use USB) at least 8GB or 4GB. I want to use Registered-ECC memory because ECC(Error-correcting code) memory is mainly utilised for servers and other mission-critical applications that require extra security and stability and this ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard do support it. So, I pick the RAM from the ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS motherboard QVL (certified vendor list).
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The Software program Licensing Service reported that the Retailer upgrade license could not be authorized. Height adjustable mobile rolling laptop personal computer desk cart with storage.Perfect for compact spaces,offices schools and universities,health-related and dental offices,and so forth. Even office energy users” will most most likely find that an entry-level workstation is a wise investment that enables new capabilities that can assist enhance productivity, boost reliability, and limit downtime. It functions the Core i5 680, the fastest dual core chip presently accessible and this indicates three.60GHz of dedicated power, which goes up to 3.83GHz when Intel’s Turbo Increase kicks in. For CAD users that ‘do design’ and tiny else this is perfect, though HyperThreading can give a tiny boost when rendering.
Going with a pro card is a smoother experience and certainly more costly, not because of hardware superiority, but just how the market’s structured. Current Lumia clients, however, will have to wait until an unspecified future date to update their devices, unless they want to get early access via the Windows Insider programme. The University of Texas of the Permian Basin tends to make library workstations offered to students, faculty, and employees, and often the basic public in order to offer access to electronic library collections and other details resources for the purpose of supporting learning and analysis. The most important aspect of moving your office is to make certain that it causes minimal disruption to the day-to-day operating of your business.
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At Europc we aim to provide higher-end refurbished Dell merchandise at bargain costs to enterprise clients all through the UK. Logical Increments assists far more than a million Pc builders every single year with hardware suggestions for any price range. The largest internal distinction amongst the Z820 and the Z800 is that although each systems have a big plastic shroud that covers the CPUs and memory, the Z820’s can be removed in 1 piece, meaning that – as with the rest of its tool-much less assembly technique – crucial components can be swapped out without the want for a screwdriver. PAWs are advisable for administration of identity systems, cloud solutions, and private cloud fabric as well as sensitive organization functions. The Software program Licensing Service determined that the version of the offline Confirmation ID (CID) is not supported.
There is no bigger workspace than a U-shaped desk it’s like obtaining 3 desks in one particular space that can keep you organized. I would teach you how to very easily make your Windows 7 primarily based pc faster by stopping commence-up applications, uninstalling applications, changing your visual effects, using Windows 7 readyboost, switching energy plans, carrying out standard maintenance on your operating program,turning off scheduled tasks, upgrading hardware, and sustaining your Computer speed. There is also the internet site that basically sell licenses only, Windows 10 Enterprise Item Essential is 35. Ought to just uncover the iso operating method (I have downloaded from the Microsoft site, I do not know if is also effortless for Windows 10 Education Item Crucial), the site offers links but I think possibly not in French.
Exporting 4K video with color-corrected clips also requires about twice the length of the video, which is about the exact same performance as the Razer Blade with GTX 1060 graphics card. Configure your CyberStation Graphics Workstation with an Intel Xeon E5 v3 processor for globe-class performance with elevated energy efficiency, DDR4 memory and high-overall performance compute capabilities for enterprise workloads. The specified key service provider can’t be opened by the DNS server. The activation server reported that it failed to delete product essential binding. Furniture things such as reception desks, reception sofas, computer workstation, executive chairs, conference room tables, bookcases, filing cabinets, etc. HP’s workstations are renowned for being difficult, and certainly this is the case: steel and tough plastic are challenging to mess up. But what caught my eye is just how easy it is to add and take away components, thanks to an ingenious system of tabs, handles, slides and slots.
Think about it: You can nonetheless write a novel on a typewriter, shoot photographs with film, or play music live and record it with a DAT deck, but very couple of firms can get their work accomplished with no PCs. Technology Services Baseline Service Level Agreement – An agreement offered by Technology Services to the University community which establishes and outlines the services Technologies Solutions will supply totally free of charge in the areas of Audio Visual and Video Conferencing Call Centre and Coaching Laptop Labs Corporate Data Systems Desktop Support E-Learning Email and Calendaring Network Solutions Web Services and, Internal Enabling Services. The comparable quad core Xeon operating at that clock speed will price about $50 far more.
If the Emperor Computer Station is also wealthy for your blood beginning at more than $5,000 there is now a new alternative for gamers, programmers, day traders, and anybody else that spends a wonderful deal of time in front of their monitor(s). Heartland Interiors not only specialises in bespoke domestic ranges but our knowledge also encompasses commercial furnishings projects such as shop fittings, workstations and storage units. A fundamental CAD workstation graphics card must be enough and will not hinder efficiency. Below the hood, the laptop is powered by a two.five GHz Intel Core i5 processor paired with 8GB of RAM. On December 7, 1999, officials of the North Carolina Occupational Security and Health Administration (NCOSHA) notified the Division of Security Investigation of this multiple fatality.
It is also referred to as as guest account card”. Use only two cores on each processor for operating your case. This whole Social movement was joined by eminent and popular sports people, Doctors, universities, and different institutions all through the United States, which has begun to raise the ire of numerous of those who had a rabid hatred of Obama and African individuals in America. The compact design and style of these desks allows you to totally use space in the ideal way possible whilst still gaining the benefits of larger desk functions. The combination of our software and the HP Z Workstation technologies lets you take all those tiles, produce a single image that is a lot smaller sized than the original, and serve it up extremely quickly—just as quickly as you can usually get a single tile to display,” added du Plessis.
Difficult drive, RAM, graphics card, fan unit and power supply can be effortlessly removed. The Boston Venom household offers a total variety of liquid-cooled, GPU-accelerated workstations made especially to cater for the ever increasing demands inside the Media & Entertainment arena. Six new security-enabled worldwide groups: Tier Replication Maintenance Tier 1 Server Maintenance Service Desk Operators Workstation Upkeep PAW Customers PAW Maintenance. Large, dedicated frame buffer and texture memory help lets you create in rich, photorealistic shading and very detailed textures – often in correct colour, with maximum depth accuracy and with double buffering enabled. Position supply documents directly in front of you, between the monitor and the keyboard, using an in-line copy stand.
Screens between workstations can also provide additional storage space and contribute greatly to the overall aesthetic design of an workplace. If you are a designer working in AutoCAD, a media creator working with photo and video, or any person utilizing the several economic evaluation, weather tracking, or geospatial mapping tools certified for the workstation, you should be well supported. Worst even is if the four RAM modules are all allocated only to the 1st processor E5-2650 v3, and the second processor is nonetheless (somehow) turned on and trying to ask the very first processor to share its memory, so that it can do its own share of the calculation as properly. The Computer software Licensing Service reported that the license could not be opened or produced.
Account data and other sensitive data is frequently stored on workstation computer systems data thieves are effectively conscious of this. The ultimate mixture of energy and overall performance, APEXX 4 7404, featuring an overclocked, liquid-cooled, ten-core Intel® Core i7, is perfect for each single-threaded and multi-threaded applications. Below, we’ve selected a choice of NVIDIA cards which offer GPU acceleration technology. Intranets are a effective system for allowing a organization to do company on-line, for instance, to allow any person on the Net to order goods. The BCDVideo client workstations supply a dependable remedy to the safety market. Boost productivity with the critical power and overall performance of AMD FirePro professional graphics cards for the HP Z420 Workstation.
Its effects have been dire already: drastic economic unfairness, the Iraq war, control of Congress by lobbyists, intractable ideologues infecting the democratic process, and a draconian war on drugs that has filled our prisons comparably to what Stalin did in the Gulag (according to Fareed Zakaria, America’s prison population has quadrupled considering that 1980, nearly entirely due to drug convictions, and we now incarcerate men and women at ten times the rate of many other developed countries). For sustained use you should consider acquiring an external monitor and external keyboard, preferably with a unfavorable-tilt keyboard, each, and arranging your workspace to create a good workstation layout. Several men and women perform in open strategy offices these days and they are often utilized in numerous diverse market sectors.
As IDC notes , the mobile workstation industry is one of the couple of locations exactly where Windows Pc sales are expanding – it only makes sense for Intel to court the growing numbers of creatives and engineers that want to do their jobs away from the workplace. (46) The Director, Technology Services (DTS) will suggest to the University Executive proper Personal computer Workstation Policy to meet the operational demands of the University. I’m certainly having a PCIe drive od some sort next time- and rates are dropping daily. If you need more energy and mega RAM then our refurbished Dell Precision workstations offer you huge savings on new. Created for more loved ones time, this desk has wheels and is ready to accommodate a busy loved ones. You require an net connection to update the database of the software.
Guest can settle the bill by paying money, charging the balance to a credit card, deferring payment to an authorized direct billing entity or utilizing a mixture of payment strategies. Workplace workstations offer you a number of supplies, colors, styles, and finishings that mean each and every office space can achieve a seemingly endless array of styles. Though the transactions have to be posted to the appropriate account as soon as they are received, the evening auditor should confirm that all the transactions received by the front office for posting are been posted, prior to starting with the audit routine. See how NASA is utilizing HP Z Workstations to help enable sustainable living for deeper voyages into space. At the heart of the method is the Intel Mobile i7 quad-core CPU, which delivers exceptional high-def multimedia, multi-tasking and multi-threaded efficiency.
It has eight DIMM slots and is hence limited to only 256 GB of dual-channel ECC DDR4-2666 SDRAM. With models that can be configured with 2TB of RAM, factory water-cooling options, and Enterprise class storage, HP Z Workstations are hugely customizable. This is a larger mobile workstation at 7.two pounds, but it also has a battery that can run for five hours at moderate load, which is relatively impressive for a laptop of this type. , sometimes a hacker can crack into the technique and steal essential can even send viruses and other bugs to your system to create mindful of this and perform with only the most secure programs available especially for sensitive data. An ergonomic chair doesn’t have to be ugly or utilitarian seeking, in truth there are numerous sophisticated designs offered and in a enormous variety of colours.
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