Online Traffic School Insights

First Study Break: Hulling Pistachios

I spent yesterday doing online Traffic School. After talking with friends and colleagues I realize that it is not at all uncommon for even the best of drivers to at some point in their motoring careers find themselves in possession of a ticket that can only be purged by going to traffic school. As I soon learned, most traffic school (at least around here) is done online. Even if one wanted to attend in person, those classes where you can mingle with your fellow alleged violators are few and far between. Not to mention in-person traffic school costs twice as much as online traffic school. Given the gouging financial nature of even teeny weeny tickets, I quickly dismissed the idea of coughing up even more cash.

It is possible that online traffic school is designed to bore you into never doing again whatever it was you are alleged to have done. Thus, as I fulfilled my obligation as a law abiding citizen and trudged my way through the do-it-yourself class, I was all the while musing on various related and unrelated topics. Which is probably a good thing because if I divulged the course materials I would no doubt be tracked down and cited.

Have you ever thought of driving a car as a means of communication akin to email and social media? I bet you haven't. I hadn't, and by the way, neither has the DMV (Division of Motor Vehicles) or anyone else in law enforcement I am aware of. As I was learning about all the ways people get into trouble with their cars and the reasons they get into trouble, and how they react behind the wheel of the car (you'd be amazed. or maybe not) it dawned on me that: people behind the wheel will communicate with other people in ways they would never dream of doing in person. 

For example, I have often watched people tear down a freeway at speeds far beyond the speed limit, cutting across lanes in front of other people no doubt scaring the daylights out of them. God forbid you should drive too slow (the speed limit) because you might find someone riding right up your tail giving you a subtle hint to GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY. Or if you don't accelerate into an intersection fast enough when the light turns green some Type A personality may HONNNNNK at you LOUD ENOUGH that you can hear it over your cranked Classic Rock station. They might even flip you the finger as they tear around you and burn rubber down the 100 feet to the next intersection. Which, apparently, leads to many nasty accidents in which your internal organs are splattered around against one another in a way you don't really want to think too closely about. But perhaps should.

Have you ever been on the receiving end of an anonymous teaching evaluation that referred to you in ways that are not printable here? I bet you have read a venomous review on Amazon or in the Comments section of an online newspaper. The kind of comment that makes you cringe.  Hiding, of course, behind a pseudonym along the lines of "Righteous Ralph" (or Ronda, not to show gender bias). If you have been using email long enough you have surely found yourself on the receiving end of a message that makes you want to cry or scream in outrage depending upon your personality. Or, just as likely, you have yourself contributed to email or online chat conversations that would *never* have happened could you but have seen the other person's pained face as you spoke.

People often need to be in the same physical space with another person in order to most effectively modulate their communication. There has been plenty of research about abominable online behavior and the psychological factors behind it. But, as I think about aggressive driving, road rage, and just a general tendency for people to be oblivious of their effect on others when behind the wheel, I hypothesize that we as a society sometimes hide behind the wheel much the same way we sometimes hide behind the computer monitor. Thesis topic anyone?

By the way, what does FTP stands for?

In most contexts  "File Transfer Protocol" would be the correct answer. However in the context of the Court System, FTP means "Failure To Pay".

I don't think they intended that to be funny, but I almost choked and I'm still grinning.

Wow...maybe Traffic School wasn't as much of a snoozer as I thought.

Many Study Breaks Later: A Stuffed Grape Leaf Casserole

The Wireless Car Considered

In order to answer the question(s) posed in my previous post, let's go back to the automobile. Your car. Unless you are into antiques, chances are that your current car is a computer on wheels (thinking from a layman's perspective). You probably know this if you ever have taken your car in for what seems like a small repair and get hit with a gigantic bill because "the chip needed to be replaced". Or, you take your car in and they tell you they will "plug it in and run diagnostics". They download some data, study it, and presto, tweak just the right part of your vehicle. You save money.

The heart of modern automobile engines is a CPU in the engine control unit which serves as a data collection hub. Approximately 150lbs of wiring runs through your car between various sensors and the engine control unit. So when something goes wrong, it might be one of the sensors, it might be a wire, or it might be the CPU. Of course, there are many many advantages to having a CPU in your car as compared to the older technology, but this isn't the right place to go into that. What is relevant however, is the fact that all those wires are MESSY. And HEAVY. And ... complex.

Imagine the advantages that could be gained if those wires could be removed and replaced with wireless broadcasting of sensor signals to the CPU.

150lbs less weight: that's about one adult, or a few kids, or many pets, or a lot of gear. Lighter car, better gas mileage.

No wires: less mess in the cars innards (think like a mechanic to fully appreciate that one).

No wires: less complexity and cost in the manufacturing process - consider the domino effect of not having to figure out placement, routing, materials use, secondary waste generation. The car should cost less to build, thus cost less to the consumer. Economies of scale can be gained if the elimination of wires in favor of wireless becomes standard.

Store the data, compress the data, transmit the data. This is where Shannon (my final hint in the last post) comes in. Claude Shannon, whose seminal work approximately 60 years ago founded what we now know of as Information Theory. Theorems about optimal point to point communication of bits. Your cell phone calls rely on application of information theory as do your Skype calls, iPod and CD storage and other applications too numerous to count. I'll come back to that later because with our automobile scenario

There Are Challenges.

For starters, we would need to make sure that my Subaru, sitting at the stoplight next to your Lexus, doesn't tell your Lexus what to do (in theory this might be fun, but I digress). Non negotiable requirement: my car's wireless transmitters need to be picked up only by my car's CPU.

In addition, my car's CPU would have to juggle incoming signals from many sensors. There are N (meaning I have no idea how many) sensors in my car, each of them likely has a different sampling rate, transmission distances vary point to point, noise is inevitable, delay is inevitable, and there are definitely other parameters that I am not thinking of. To function properly, my wireless car's CPU must receive all the encoded data in sufficiently robust form in a timely fashion.

If you are familiar with classic information theory, you know where I am going. If you aren't, then I'll point out: Shannon's seminal work on data storage, compression and transmission didn't anticipate the kind of requirements involved in developing a functional wireless network automobile.

But there is a group of people working on this exact problem and the larger class of problems of which it is a part. And the results they come up with will effect Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Social Sciences, Engineering, and more.

To Be Continued...

 (I won't make you wait a week)

An Interdisciplinary Puzzle For You To Figure Out

Today I am going to give you something to ponder for a few days - see if you can figure it out. Then, next week I'll tell you all about an exciting project I learned about this week.

What do biological, physical, social, engineering and financial systems have in common?

Toss in Computer Science. Computing is key to solving the puzzle of what this mystery project is.

A concrete example of where it all comes together involves one of the most prevalent objects in the developed and developing world: the automobile.

Think about how many feet of wiring runs through your car. How many feet do you think there are on average, front to back? Have you ever thought about that?

What does the wiring in your car accomplish and what are the critical factors in its proper functioning (don't forget about temporal issues)?

Wiring: kind of Old School technology don't you think?

Let's say you remove the wiring (or most of it) from your car. What advantages might you get from eliminating the wiring?

WHY DO WE CARE? (hint: economic productivity is one answer)

Hopefully some ideas are popping into your head - crazy ideas are fine. Crazy ideas are very good. Innovation comes from so-called crazy ideas and that is rarely a bad thing.

I leave you with a parting final hint: Claude Shannon.

If you come up with the solution before I post about it you gain enormous brownie points and public acknowledgement of having a highly productive brain. All ideas welcome.

Enjoy your mental percolations.

Charles Babbage the Interactive Auto GPS

Oddly enough, just 2 posts after I wrote about the development of s/w to recognize emotions that started out with a discussion of (imo) annoying auto GPSs, I find a short article and video about a British researcher named Peter Robinson who is developing a quite sophisticated auto GPS system (full story here). The video starts out by echoing my sentiment of how annoying and sometimes inaccurate a car GPS can be, and he actually tosses one in the back seat! I LOVED that moment. And he does it with such poise and non-violence. Just flips it behind him.

Then he discusses why it would be useful to have an interactive conversation with a computer - the computer can read your facial and bodily expressions, determine your emotional state and respond with its own emotion inflected conversation. That is both technically interesting and potentially useful in many areas of society.  I bet you can think of a few areas where this technology could be used productively?

But then he proceeds to discuss how he is testing the system on an auto GPS. Why oh why the fascination with the auto GPS??? Ok I accede to this as a useful example of holding a conversation, where important decisions have to be made on short notice, and there are unpredictable behaviors and circumstances to be dealt with. The creepy part is when Robinson pulls out a custom made head of Charles Babbage (looks a bit rubbery) and props it up at head level in the passenger seat of a car in a driving simulator. The two, Robinson and Babbage, carry on a very polite conversation about road conditions. Robinson ends by saying "Charles, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship".

I have mixed feelings about the idea of driving down the road talking to a life size rubber head with wires coming out the back of it.

Technical information is included in the short video, and there is an interesting bit about how it all works. There are definitely compelling issues of emotional intelligence, neuroscience, psychology, and physiology here to explore. Robinson sees this development as the future of how we will interact with computers. Maybe AI has a not too distant future in realistically simulating life? That would be great progress indeed after years of inching along.

But the rubber head... I don't know about the rubber head. If it made mistakes and the driver got irritated, and tossed it in the backseat, would it start complaining from its disembodied self face down on the seat?