Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

This time of year I do a lot of online shopping, and my bell rings with many deliveries. But today and tomorrow, not Saturday. The post office comes Saturday but has announced it wants to stop doing that to save money. They do need to save money, but this is the wrong approach. I think the time has come for Saturday and Sunday delivery to be the norm for UPS, Fedex and the rest.

There are a large number of constitutional amendments being proposed to reverse the effects of the recent US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Here the court held that Citizens United, a group which had produced an anti-Hilary Clinton documentary, had the right to run ads promoting their documentary and its anti-Clinton message. It had been held at the lower court that because the documentary and thus the ads advocated against a candidate, they were restricted under campaign finance rules. Earlier, however, the court had held earlier that it was OK for Michael Moore to run ads for Fahrenheit 9/11, his movie which strongly advocated against re-electing George W. Bush. The court could not find the fine line between these that the lower court had held, but the result was a decision that has people very scared because it strips most restrictions on campaigning by groups and in particular corporations. Corporations have most of the money, and money equals influence in elections.

Most attempts at campaign finance reform and control have run into a constitutional wall. That's because when people talk about freedom of speech, it's hard to deny that political speech is the most sacred, most protected of the forms of speech being safeguarded by the 1st amendment. Rules that try to say, "You can't use your money to get out the message that you like or hate a candidate" are hard to reconcile with the 1st amendment. The court has made that more clear and so the only answer is an amendment, many feel.

It seems like that should not be hard. After all, the court only ruled 5-4, and partisan lines were involved. Yet in the dissent, it seems clear to me that the dissenters don't so much claim that political speech is not being abridged by the campaign finance rules, but rather that the consequences of allowing big money interests to dominate the political debate are so grave that it would be folly to allow it, almost regardless of what the bill of rights says. The courts have kept saying that campaign finance reform efforts don't survive first amendment tests, and the conclusion many have come to is that CFR is so vital that we must weaken the 1st amendment to get it.

With all the power of an amendment to play with, I have found most of the proposed amendments disappointing and disturbing. Amendments should be crystal clear, but I find many of the proposals to be muddy when viewed in the context of the 1st amendment, even though as later amendments they have the right to supersede it.

The problem is this: When they wrote that the freedom of the press should not be abridged, they were talking about the big press. They really meant organizations like the New York Times and Fox News. If those don't have freedom of the press, nobody does. And these are corporations. Until very recently it wasn't really possible to put out your political views to the masses on your terms unless you were a media corporation, or paid a media corporation to do it for you. The internet is changing that but the change is not yet complete.

Many of the amendments state that they do not abridge freedom of the press. But what does that mean? If the New York Times or Fox News wish to use their corporate money to endorse or condemn a candidate -- as they usually do -- is that something we could dare let the government restrict? Would we allow the NYT to do it in their newspaper, but not in other means, such as buying ads in another newspaper, should they wish to do so? Is the Fox News to be defined as something different from Citizens United?

I'm hard pressed to reconcile freedom of the press and the removal of the ability of corporations (including media ones) from using money to put out a political message. What I fear as that to do so requires that the law -- nay, the constitution -- try to define what is being "press" and what is not. This is something we've been afraid to do in every other context, and something I and my associates have fought to prevent, as lawsuits have tried to declare that bloggers, for example, were not mainstream press and thus did not have the same freedom of the press as the big boys.

Earlier I wrote about desires for the next generation of DSLR camera and a number of readers wrote back that they wanted to be able to swap the sensor in their camera, most notably so they could put in a B&W sensor with no colour filter mask on it. This would give you better B&W photos and triple your light gathering ability, though for now only astronomers are keen enough on this to justify filterless cameras.

As expected, there's more news from the Tokyo auto show, which is well known for strange concept cars.

First there is the Toyota Fun Vii

Nissan has announced a new version of their Pivo concept car. The Pivo 3 here's a story with a video offers 4 wheel steering and automatic parking, including a claimed functionality for automated valet parking. In the AVP case, the car requires a special parking lot, though it is not said what changes are needed. A few years ago the Stanford team demonstrated Junior 3 which could valet park in a lot to which it had a map, and which had no civilian pedestrians.

In contrast to the optimism I usually present here, and last week's article about a self-driving Mercedes just a year away it's worth noting this interview with various BMW folks where they provide a much more cautious timeline of at least a decade. Part of their concern comes from the use of computer vision systems.

For the first time, a car company has put a date on shipment of a car with self-driving ability.

According to British site Auto Express, Mercedes has revealed that their 2013 S-class will feature self-driving. Not clear if there is an official company press release, though the company has been talking about such features, as have many other companies. Realize that the 2013 model year is just a year away.

I shoot with the Canon 5d Mark II. While officially not a pro camera, the reality is that a large fraction of professional photographers use this camera rather than the Eos-1D cameras which are faster but much bulkier and in some ways even inferior to the 5D. But it's been out a long time now, and everybody is wondering when its successor will come and what features it will have.

Each increment in the DSLR world has been quite dramatic over the last decade. There's always been a big increase in resolution with the new generation, but now at 22 megapixels there's less call for that. While there are lenses that deliver more than 22 megapixels sharply, they are usually quite expensive, and while nobody would turn down 50mp for free, there just wouldn't be nearly as much benefit from it than the last doubling. Here's a look at features that might come, or at least be wished for.

Better Pixels

More pixels may not be important, but everybody wants better pixels.

• Low noise / higher ISO: The 5D2 astounded us with ISO 3200 shots that aren't very noisy. Unlike megapixels, there is almost no limit to how high we would like ISO to go at low noise levels. Let's hope we see 12,500 or more at low noise, plus even 50,000 noisy. Due to physics, smaller pixels have higher noise, so this is another reason not to increase the megapixel count.
• 3 colour: The value of full 3-colour samples at every pixel has been overstated in the past. The reason is that Bayer interpolation is actually quite good, and almost every photographer would rather have 18 million bayer pixels over 6 million full RGB pixels. It's not even a contest. As we start maxing out our megapixels to match our lenses, this is one way to get more out of a picture. But if it means smaller pixels, it causes noise. The Foveon approach which stacked the 3 pixels would be OK here -- finally. But I don't expect this to be very likely.
• Higher dynamic range: How about 16 bits per pixel, or even 24? HDR photography is cool but difficult. But nobody doesn't want more range, if only for the ability to change exposure decisions after the fact and bring out those shadows or highlights. Automatic HDR in the camera would be nice but it's no substitute for try high-range pixels.

Video & Audio

Due to the high quality video in the 5D2, many professional videographers now use it. Last week Canon announced new high-end video cameras aimed at that market, so they may not focus on improvements in this area. If they do, people might like to see things like 60 frame video, ability to focus while shooting, higher ISO, and 4K video.

Last week, new studies came back on the California High Speed Rail project. They have raised the estimated cost to $99 billion, and dropped the ridership estimate to 36.8 million and $5.5 billion in annual revenue. Note that only around 20 million people currently fly the SF to LA corridor -- they expect to not just capture most of those but large numbers of central valley trips.

Congestion on the roads has a variety of sources. These include accidents of course, reductions in road capacity, irrational human driving behaviours and others, but most of all you get congestion when more cars are trying to use a road than it has capacity for.

That's why the two main success stories in congestion today are metering lights and downtown congestion charging. Metering lights limit how fast cars can enter the highway, so that you don't overload it and traffic flows smoothly. By waiting a bit at the metering light you get a fast ride once on the highway. Sometimes though, especially when the other factors like accidents come into play, things still gum up.

Now that more and more cars are connected (by virtue just of the smartphone the driver carries if nothing else) the potential will open up for something else in congestion -- finding ways to encourage drivers to leave a congested road.

A little self-plug. I have an article on an introduction to panoramic photographic technique the November issue of Photo Technique with a few panos in it. This is old world journalism, folks -- you have to read it on paper at least for now.

I'm just back from the "ITS World Congress" an annual meeting of people working on "Intelligent Transportation Systems" which means all sorts of applications of computers and networking to transportation, particularly cars. A whole bunch of stuff gets covered there, including traffic monitoring and management, toll collection, transit operations etc. but what's of interest to robocar enthusiasts is what goes into cars and streets. People started networking cars with systems like OnStar, now known in the generic sense as "telematics" but things have grown since then.

The big effort involves putting digital radios into cars. The radio system, known by names like 802.11p, WAVE and DSRC involves an 802.11 derived protocol in a new dedicated band at 5.9ghz. The goal is a protocol suitable for safety applications, with super-fast connections and reliable data. Once the radios in the car, the car will be able to use it to talk to other cars (known as V2V) or to infrastructure facilities such as traffic lights (known as V2I.) The initial planned figured that the V2I services would give you internet in your car, but the reality is that 4G cellular networks have taken over that part of the value chain.

Coming up with value for V2V is a tricky proposition. Since you can only talk to cars very close to you, it's not a reliable way to talk with any particular car. Relaying through the wide area network is best for that unless you need lots of bandwidth or really low latency. There's not much that needs lots of bandwidth, but safety applications do demand both low latency and a robust system that doesn't depend on infrastructure.

The current approach to safety applications is to have equipped cars transmit status information. Formerly called a "here I am" this is a broadcast of location, direction, speed and signals like brake lights, turn signals etc. If somebody else's car is transmitting that, your car can detect their presence, even if you can't see them. This lets your car detect and warn about things like:

• The car 2 or 3 in front of you, hidden by the truck in front of you, that has hit the brakes or stalled
• People in your blind spot, or who are coming up on you really fast when your're about to change lanes
• Hidden cars coming up when you want to turn left, or want to pass on a rural highway
• Cars about to run red lights or blow stop signs at an intersection you're about to go through
• Privacy is a big issue. The boxes change their ID every minute so you can't track a car over a long distance unless you can follow it over every segment, but is that enough? They say a law is needed so the police don't use the speed broadcast to ticket you, but will it stay that way?

It turns out that intersection collisions are a large fraction of crashes, so there's a big win there, if you can do it. The problem is one of critical mass. Installed in just a few cars, such a system is extremely unlikely to provide aid. For things like blindspot detection, existing systems that use cameras or radars are far better because they see all cars, not just those with radios. Even with 10% penetration, there's only a 1% chance any given collision could be prevented with the system, though it's a 10% chance for the people who seek out the system. (Sadly, those who seek out fancy safety systems are probably less likely to be the ones blowing through red lights, and indeed another feature of the system -- getting data from traffic lights -- already can do a lot to stop an equipped car from going through a red light by mistake.)

They say that famous deaths come in threes. That's no doubt just an artifact of our strange sense of coincidence, but after Jobs and Ritchie, tonight we learn of the death of John McCarthy, AI pioneer and creator of LISP.

Since getting involved with Google's self-driving-car team, I've had to keep silent about its internals, but for those who are interested in the project, a recent presentation at the intelligent robotics conference in San Francisco is now up on youtube. The talk is by Sebastian Thrun (overall project leader) and Chris Urmson, lead developer. Sebastian led the Stanley and Junior teams in the Darpa Grand Challenge and Chris led CMU teams, including BOSS which won the urban challenge.

The list of robocar teams grows again with a new project from Oxford university, led by Paul Newman. Nissan is also involved, though the base vehicle is a Bowler Wildcat off-road vehicle.

Earlier I wrote about the transportation potential of walking robots-of-burden like BigDog. While these robots are not for the long haul, a whole range of options are opened up by a wheeled vehicle that can get to where the road ends, and then lower legs to walk along rough terrain, up stairs and up hills.

Boston Dynamics has gone even further with their latest model, AlphaDog

I'm actually not a fan of login and sessions on the web, and in fact prefer a more stateless concept I call authenticated actions to the more common systems of login and "identity."

But I'm not going to win the day soon on that, and I face many web sites that think I should have a login session, and that session should in fact terminate if I don't click on the browser often enough. This frequently has really annoying results -- you can be working on a complex form or other activity, then switch off briefly to other web sites or email to come back and find that "your session has expired" and you have to start from scratch.

There are times when there is an underlying reason for this. For example, when booking things like tickets, the site needs to "hold" your pending reservation until you complete it, but if you're not going to complete it, they need to return that ticket or seat to the pool for somebody else to buy. But many times sessions expire without that reason. Commonly the idea is that for security, they don't want to leave you logged on in a way that might allow somebody to come to your computer after you leave it and take over your session to do bad stuff. That is a worthwhile concept, particularly for people who will do sessions at public terminals, but it's frustrating when it happens on the computer in your house when you're alone.

Many sites also overdo it. While airlines need to cancel your pending seat requests after a while, there is no reason for them to forget everything and make you start from scratch. That's just bad web design. Other sites are happy to let you stay "logged on" for a year.

To help, it would be nice if the browser had a way of communicating things it knows about your session with the computer to trusted web sites. The browser knows if you have just switched to other windows, or even to other applications where you are using your mouse and keyboard. Fancier tools have even gone so far as to use your webcam and microphone to figure if you are still at your desk or have left the computer. And you know whether your computer is in a public space, semi-public space or entirely private space. If a browser, or browser plug-in, has a standardized way to let a site query session status, or be informed of session changes and per-machine policy, sites could be smarter about logging you out. That doesn't mean your bank still should not be paranoid if you are logged in to a session where you can spend your money, but they can be more informed about it.

Some time ago I ranted how I hate being invited to fill out a customer service survey after every bloody transaction in the online world. Companies don't seem to clue in that if they ask for surveys too much, they end up getting the opinions only of the angered or overeager.

Some Robocar updates, since with Burning Man and Singularity U my posting volume has been down: