Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

wireless ECG

This paper from MIT describes a technology that can read emotions accurately by detecting heartbeats simply by bouncing a wireless signal off a person. It is supposedly as accurate as a an electrocardiogram. Reading emotions this way is pretty amazing, but to me just the idea of reading a heartbeat accurately this way sounds like a pretty big deal in a medical setting. It also could have obvious implications in psychology, and quite possibly disturbing uses in security, intelligence, military and business settings. Imagine something like Google Glass giving you information on the health and emotions of a person you are talking to.

Emotion Recognition using Wireless Signals

This paper demonstrates a new technology that can infer
a person’s emotions from RF signals reflected off his body.
EQ-Radio transmits an RF signal and analyzes its reflections
off a person’s body to recognize his emotional state (happy,
sad, etc.). The key enabler underlying EQ-Radio is a new
algorithm for extracting the individual heartbeats from the
wireless signal at an accuracy comparable to on-body ECG
monitors. The resulting beats are then used to compute
emotion-dependent features which feed a machine-learning
emotion classifier. We describe the design and implementation
of EQ-Radio, and demonstrate through a user study
that its emotion recognition accuracy is on par with state-of-the-art
emotion recognition systems that require a person
to be hooked to an ECG monitor.

bill negotiators

I just learned of two companies that will negotiate with your cable company on your behalf, in exchange for a share of the savings. Shrinkabill.com and BillFixers.com.

There should be a lot of business opportunities out there like this because we have so many subscriptions and bills now and they are so complex and screwed up. Beyond utilities, you have screwed up medical bills obviously. Shopping around for homeowners and car insurance periodically can really pay off. Then there are simple repairs and maintenance that can lower energy and water bills. Property tax assessments can sometimes be challenged successfully. Mortgage and other lending terms can be negotiated, and if companies are not willing to negotiate they can be refinanced or consolidated. And yet most of us are too busy to spend time doing all this. It wouldn’t make sense to take time off work to do it, and we don’t want to give up our limited family and leisure time. But if there are businesses out there who will do it for you and it puts a little money in both your pockets that wasn’t there before, it’s a win-win.

 

30% of African elephants gone in 7 years

A project called The Great Elephant Census has this shocking statistic.

Continent-wide survey reveals massive decline in African savannah elephants

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) are imperiled by poaching and habitat loss. Despite global attention to the plight of elephants, their population sizes and trends are uncertain or unknown over much of Africa. To conserve this iconic species, conservationists need timely, accurate data on elephant populations. Here, we report the results of the Great Elephant Census (GEC), the first continent-wide, standardized survey of African savannah elephants. We also provide the first quantitative model of elephant population trends across Africa. We estimated a population of 352,271 savannah elephants on study sites in 18 countries, representing approximately 93% of all savannah elephants in those countries. Elephant populations in survey areas with historical data decreased by an estimated 144,000 from 2007 to 2014, and populations are currently shrinking by 8% per year continent-wide, primarily due to poaching. Though 84% of elephants occurred in protected areas, many protected areas had carcass ratios that indicated high levels of elephant mortality. Results of the GEC show the necessity of action to end the African elephants’ downward trajectory by preventing poaching and protecting habitat.

It’s heartbreaking for at least two reasons. The obvious one is the elephants themselves because they are such a charismatic, iconic species. The African savannah ecosystem more broadly is iconic and its loss is also deeply disturbing. This is an example of a problem that probably almost everyone can understand and agree on, and yet our species is not solving it. It’s hard to have hope that we can solve the more complex and controversial problems if we can’t solve this one. It’s going to be a sad day when we realize the wild elephants are gone, possibly a sort of psychological tipping point for our civilization’s relationship with nature.

oil discoveries at 70 year low

Here’s a long article from Bloomberg called Oil Discoveries at 70-Year Low Signal Supply Shortfall Ahead. The basic thesis is that prices are so low companies have stopped looking for new oil, and ones existing supplies start to run out prices will rise.

Explorers in 2015 discovered only about a tenth as much oil as they have annually on average since 1960. This year, they’ll probably find even less, spurring new fears about their ability to meet future demand.

With oil prices down by more than half since the price collapse two years ago, drillers have cut their exploration budgets to the bone. The result: Just 2.7 billion barrels of new supply was discovered in 2015, the smallest amount since 1947, according to figures from Edinburgh-based consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Ltd. This year, drillers found just 736 million barrels of conventional crude as of the end of last month.

That’s a concern for the industry at a time when the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that global oil demand will grow from 94.8 million barrels a day this year to 105.3 million barrels in 2026. While the U.S. shale boom could potentially make up the difference, prices locked in below $50 a barrel have undercut any substantial growth there.

How soon will this have an effect? 2025 according to one source cited in this article, 2040 according to another. That seems pretty far out to me to make precise predictions. Hopefully we will have a cheap, reliable renewable energy source by then. But maybe we will have explosive population and consumption growth. Or maybe the world economy will tank. It’s just hard to say. I’m not snapping up oil stocks just yet.

Ford

Ford seems to be waking up to the possibilities of self-driving cars and integrated multi-modal transportation.

The century-old automaker will buy San Francisco shuttle startup Chariot and expand its services nationally and internationally. Ford also will team up with New York bike-sharing firm Motivate to bring its services to more cities throughout the Bay Area, with the goal of providing 7,000 bikes in the region by the end of 2018, up from the current 700. Riders will be able to access those bikes, as well as shuttles from Chariot, through an online service called FordPass.

“We’re taking a look at the whole ecosystem of moving people around,” Fields said in an interview Friday.

Better late than never. I was wondering if any of the Detroit companies would wake up and join forces with the tech industry, rather than just continuing to fade into irrelevance and obsolescence until one day they are gone and nobody cares. Are GM and Chrysler going to follow or are they just hoping for a government bailout every once in awhile?

Obama on self driving cars

I like the byline on this article from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Barack Obama is president of the United States.

I suppose there are people out there who don’t know that. But are they people who read newspapers?

Anyway, Obama appears to be a fan of self-driving cars:

In the seven-and-a-half years of my presidency, self-driving cars have gone from sci-fi fantasy to an emerging reality with the potential to transform the way we live.

Right now, too many people die on our roads – 35,200 last year alone – with 94 percent of those the result of human error or choice. Automated vehicles have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year…

Even as we focus on the safety of automated vehicles, we know that this technology, as with any new technology, has the potential to create new jobs and render other jobs obsolete. So it’s critical that we also provide new resources and job training to prepare every American for the good-paying jobs of tomorrow.

It’s interesting to measure technological progress in Presidential terms. This is a major technological advance that happened fast, and yet, like most advances, we get used to it so fast we kind of think we saw it coming all along. But many of us remember where we were and what we were thinking about the year Obama got elected, and I don’t remember thinking much about self-driving cars. And if I was mentioning them to friends, I was getting laughed at. Of course, now it turns out those friends knew it all along. What am I predicting for the next eight years. Perhaps we will all have pet glow-in-the-dark woolly mini-mammoths. Or maybe not, but I don’t think exotic genetically engineered pets would be far out of the realm of possibility. You heard it here first.

tree type and heat mitigation

Here is an article on how the specific type of street tree affects the urban heat island locally, focusing on plant area index.

Microclimate benefits that different street tree species provide to sidewalk pedestrians relate to differences in Plant Area Index

The way a street tree is able to modify the local microclimate on pedestrian walkways may vary according to tree species according to key canopy and leaf characteristics, such as leaf angle, leaf size, canopy architecture or simply canopy density. Three similar north-south orientated streets, with three different tree species possessing different canopy and leaf characteristics were studied in summer 2014. Microclimatic parameters were measured on pedestrian walkways below and away from tree canopies between 06:00 and 20:00 on three cloudless days. Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) was estimated to indicate pedestrian thermal comfort. Microclimate conditions were measured below and away from trees at solar noon for a wide range of trees with different Plant Area Index (PAI) as determined using full-frame photography. In streets with Ulmus procera and Platanus x acerifolia trees, the microclimatic benefits were significantly greater than the street with Eucalyptus scoparia trees, however no significant differences in the estimated PET. Microclimate benefit increased with increasing PAI for all three tree species, however no significant difference in under-canopy microclimate amongst tree species when the PAI was similar. It appears that differences in PAI are paramount in determining the microclimatic and PET benefits. Obviously, certain tree species have a limit of the PAI they can achieve, and that should be considered when selecting or comparing tree species for shading and cooling benefits. This study assists urban planners and landscape professionals in selecting street tree species for cooling benefits based on the expected or managed tree canopy area.

I’d heard of Leaf Area Index before I read this abstract, but not Plant Area Index. A search for Plant Area Index on Google brings up a Wikipedia definition of Leaf Area Index as the top hit.

Leaf area index (LAI) is a dimensionless quantity that characterizes plant canopies. It is defined as the one-sided green leaf area per unit ground surface area (LAI = leaf area / ground area, m2 / m2) in broadleaf canopies.

The best explanation of the difference I could find on the internet is here:

Leaf (or needles in the case of conifers) should be seen here as a generic term for designing the above ground aeral extent of vegetation. if no distinction is made between leaves (needles) and the other elements, the proper term to use is PAI: Plant Area Index rather than LAI.

So I guess the plant area index accounts for the trunk, branches, stems, etc.

macroinvertebrates (aka worms and bugs) in rain gardens

Even though the names imply they are living ecosystems, stormwater management engineers still have a tendency to think of rain gardens and bioretention basins as inert systems. It’s good to see the profession working with other disciplines and taking soil science more seriously these days. And where most are focused on physical, chemical, and plant-based processes, a few are looking more closely at the importance of animal activity.

Soil invertebrates in Australian rain gardens and their potential roles in storage and processing of nitrogen

Research on rain gardens generally focuses on hydrology, geochemistry, and vegetation. The role of soil invertebrates has largely been overlooked, despite their well-known impacts on soil nutrient storage, removal, and processing. Surveys of three rain gardens in Melbourne, Australia, revealed a soil invertebrate community structure that differed significantly among sites but was stable across sampling dates (July 2013 and April 2014). Megadrilacea (earthworms), Enchytraeidae (potworms), and Collembola (springtails) were abundant in all sites, and together accounted for a median of 80% of total soil invertebrate abundance. Earthworms were positively correlated to soil organic matter content, but the abundances of other taxonomic groups were not strongly related to organic matter content, plant cover, or root biomass across sites. While less than 5% of total soil N was estimated to be stored in the body tissues of these three taxa, and estimated N gas emissions from earthworms (N2O and N2) were low, ingestion and processing of soil was high (e.g., up to 417% of the upper 5 cm of soil ingested by earthworms annually in one site), suggesting that the contribution of these organisms to N cycling in rain gardens may be substantial. Thus, invertebrate communities represent an overlooked feature of rain garden design that can play an important role in the structure and function of these systems.

the U.S. and Russia are at war

It’s kind of donned on me slowly that the U.S. and Russia are at war. We have military forces operating in the same places inside Syria, in support of opposite sides in that war. We have the ability to stop the fighting at any time by negotiating directly with each other. The only thing we are not doing is intentionally targeting each other’s forces directly. The idea that we are both there fighting a shadowy third side that we both oppose defies logic to me. This is getting more and more dangerous. Still, I’m glad it is being discussed in the Security Council which seems like the right venue.

U.S. Central Command admitted Saturday that airstrikes conducted that morning by American-led forces unintentionally hit Syrian government targets instead of members of the Islamic State.

“Coalition forces believed they were striking [an ISIS] fighting position that they had been tracking for a significant amount of time before the strike,” Centcom said. “The coalition airstrike was halted immediately when coalition officials were informed by Russian officials that it was possible the personnel and vehicles targeted were part of the Syrian military.”

Following the announcement, which threatens the recent U.S.-Russia cease-fire deal, Moscow called an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, criticized Russia for the meeting request, and Moscow in turn bristled at her slam. The mistake has potentially big ramifications because Russia and the United States support opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, though both oppose ISIS.

 

minimum parking requirements

Here’s a short, visually engaging video about the problem with minimum parking requirements. Apparently, this worked in Ottawa. I don’t want to be cynical, but I am not convinced the residents, politicians, and bureaucrats of my town would respond similarly to such a logical argument. I would love for everyone to prove me wrong.