'True Size Map' Proves You've Been Picturing The Planet All Wrong

As reported by Huffpost Travel: Did you know that California is more than four times the size of Portugal? Or that you could fit China, the U.S. and India into the continent of Africa, with room to spare? 

Prepare yourself for a whole new kind of geography lesson.

The True Size Map shows countries as many travelers would say they are meant to be seen: in their "true," relative sizes. The inventors of the handy online tool point out that most maps are based on the Mercator projection, a schema that distorts the scale of many countries because it enlarges nations as they get farther from the Equator. While helpful in some cases, this doesn't give travelers a totally accurate vision of the Earth's spatial layout. True Size's answer to map-making, however, will seriously put your trip into perspective. 

Visit TheTrueSize.com to toggle The True Size Map. 

The New Boss on Construction Sites Is a Drone

Drones are being used to capture video footage that shows construction progress at the Sacramento Kings' new stadium in California.

As reported by MIT Technology Review: For some construction workers, any thoughts of slacking off could soon seem rather quaint. The drones will almost certainly notice.

The site of a lavish new downtown stadium for the Sacramento Kings in California is being monitored by drones and software that can automatically flag slow progress.

Once per day, several drones automatically patrol the Sacramento work site, collecting video footage. That footage is then converted into a three-dimensional picture of the site, which is fed into software that compares it to computerized architectural plans as well as a the construction work plan showing when each element should be finished. The software can show managers how the project is progressing, and can automatically highlight parts that may be falling behind schedule.

“We highlight at-risk locations on a site, where the probability of having an issue is really high,” says Mani Golparvar-Fard, an assistant professor in the department of civil engineering at the University of Illinois, who developed the software with several colleagues. It can show, for example, that a particular structural element is behind schedule, perhaps because materials have not yet arrived. “We can understand why deviations are happening, and we can see where efficiency improvements are made,” Golparvar-Fard says.

The project highlights the way new technologies allow manual work to be monitored and scrutinized, and it comes as productivity in other areas of work, including many white collar jobs, is being tracked more closely using desktop and smartphone software.

Software developed at the University of Illinois can show different stages of construction.

Such additional scrutiny is sometimes controversial. The tracking of office workers raises worries over privacy, for instance, and fears that people may be encouraged to work excessive hours.

Golparvar-Fard concedes that this could be an issue, but he defends the idea. “It’s not new to the construction industry that there would either be people standing and observing operations, or that there would be fixed cameras,” he says. “Yes, making this autonomous has a different feeling for the workers. But you have to keep in mind that it’s not really questioning the efficiency of the workers, it’s questioning what resources these guys need to be more efficient.”

Such concerns aren’t slowing down development of the technology required for monitoring construction work. The falling cost of drone hardware and the availability of sophisticated control, navigation, and planning software have helped the aerial vehicles make a large impact on the agriculture industry already (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Agricultural Drones”).

Monitoring activity across a large, complex construction site is particularly difficult because there are so many moving parts, and because the jobs being performed change frequently. A report published in 2009 by the National Research Council of the National Academies found that construction lags behind other industries such as manufacturing in terms of productivity, and blamed the situation on problems with planning, coӧrdination, and communication.

Another project involves tracking the activity of individual construction workers in video footage.

At the Sacramento project, video is being captured by a drone-operating company called ImageInFlight. The software developed by the University of Illinois team can show how different subcontracting teams are working together.

Lincoln Wood, regional manager for virtual design and construction at Turner Construction, which is running the Sacramento project, says that while it is common to monitor progress closely, the near-real-time aerial images and software analysis being used there provides a more comprehensive picture of what’s going on, and can highlight how a slowdown in one area may affect the entire project. “The nice thing about it is that it’s showing all the tasks in an area, so people are seeing the global impact,” he says.

The software developed by Golparvar-Fard and his colleagues includingTimothy Bretl, an associate professor of robotics, and Derek Hoiem, an associate professor of computer science, is also being used at a high-rise construction project in Arizona, and by Taisei, a large construction company in Japan.

The University of Illinois team is currently testing a system that will allow drones to attach cameras to locations across a building site, so that activity can be monitored continually. In experiments, they are also using a crowdsourcing platform to categorize workers’ activities in video footage. A manager can then see how different tasks are being performed overall, and how much time each individual is spending on a job.

This level of surveillance could prove even more controversial. A spokesman for the Laborer’s International Union of North America (LIUNA) said the organization was not aware of such technology, and declined to comment.

Verizon’s 5G Tests Show it to be Faster than Google Fiber

As reported by 9to5Mac: Early tests of Verizon‘s 5G technology show that it can achieve connection speeds 30-50 times faster than 4G/LTE – above the speeds offered by Google Fiber’s gigabit wired broadband. Even better, the company expects to have “some level of commercial deployment” by 2017, some three years earlier than expected, reports CNET.

To put that speed difference into perspective, the movie Guardians of the Galaxy would take around six minutes to download over a good LTE connection – while 5G would have it downloaded to your device in just 15 seconds …

There is, of course, a big difference between beginning commercial deployment with a select number of clients and you or I being able to get our hands on all that tasty, tasty bandwidth. There will also be the usual chicken-and-egg situation with faster data speeds: carriers waiting until there are enough devices capable of using it before they make it widely available, and manufacturers like Apple waiting until the network capacity is sufficiently widespread to make it worth adding to devices.

But Verizon does look to be upping the pace, moving tests out of the lab and into the field during the next 12 months. That could encourage others to speed up their own plans. South Korea had been expected to be first to launch, with a trial 5G network in place for the Winter Olympics in 2018, Japan aiming for the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2020.

“It’s a very aggressive timeline,” said Rima Qureshi, chief strategy officer of telecommunications equipment supplier Ericsson. “It’ll be interesting to see what the reaction is.”

Trials have so far been limited to Verizon’s own innovation centers in Waltham, Massachusetts, and San Francisco. It will need the government to release more radio spectrum before it can go beyond field tests.

For technical trials themselves, we have what we need,” said Roger Gurnani, chief information and technology architect for Verizon. “Beyond that, 5G will require big bands of spectrum.”

Apple generally adopts a wait-and-see policy with new technology, having waited until the iPhone 5 in 2012 before adding LTE capabilities to its iPhones – almost two years after carriers began offering the faster connection speeds. It did, however, move more swiftly with LTE Advanced (LTE-A), adding support for the 150Mbit/s fast-track LTE service in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Toyota Investing $50M Over 5 Years with Stanford, MIT for Autonomous-Vehicle Research

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Toyota is investing $50 million with Stanford and MIT for autonomous-vehicle research that it says will focus on things like learning how to drive from humans, how to anticipate what people or other vehicles will do on the road, and how best to interact with people.

The Japanese automaker said Friday that it’s investing the money over five years, and it will be split evenly between the two universities. The project will be led by Gill Pratt, a roboticist and former program manager at DARPA who had organized the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

The auto maker has lured the organizer of the DARPA Robotics Challenge to lead its new AI research effort.

Pratt said safety and autonomy—of people, more than cars—are the overall goals of the artificial-intelligence research. Stanford plans to study topics such as decision making, reasoning, sensing, and perception, while MIT researchers will work on things like smart user interfaces and collecting and analyzing data from humans in hopes of figuring out how we drive.

Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, known as CSAIL, said her group’s priority is “building a car that is never responsible for a collision.”

Toyota reiterated on Friday that even as cars get smarter and more capable, it wants to keep drivers involved in the act of piloting them—a different tack from the one Google is taking with its fully autonomous vehicles that are roaming the streets in Silicon Valley (see “Toyota Unveils an Autonomous Car, But Says It’ll Keep Drivers in Control”).

Kiyotaka Ise, senior managing officer at Toyota and chief officer of the company’s research and development program, said Friday through a translator that he thinks it will “take quite a long time to have a driverless car.” But he also said that the company will continue to pursue the goal of an autonomous vehicle and, along the way, apply technologies developed for cars to help people drive.

Researcher Hacks LIDAR Self-driving Car Sensors

As reported by IEEE Spectrum: The multi-thousand-dollar laser ranging (lidar) systems that most self-driving cars rely on to sense obstacles can be hacked by a setup costing just $60, according to a security researcher.

“I can take echoes of a fake car and put them at any location I want,” says Jonathan Petit, Principal Scientist at Security Innovation, a software security company. “And I can do the same with a pedestrian or a wall.”

Using such a system, attackers could trick a self-driving car into thinking something is directly ahead of it, thus forcing it to slow down. Or they could overwhelm it with so many spurious signals that the car would not move at all for fear of hitting phantom obstacles.

In a paper written while he was a research fellow in the University of Cork’s Computer Security Group and due to be presented at the Black Hat Europe security conference in November, Petit describes a simple setup he designed using a low-power laser and a pulse generator. “It’s kind of a laser pointer, really. And you don’t need the pulse generator when you do the attack,” he says. “You can easily do it with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino. It’s really off the shelf.”

Petit set out to explore the vulnerabilities of autonomous vehicles, and quickly settled on sensors as the most susceptible technologies. “This is a key point, where the input starts,” he says. “If a self-driving car has poor inputs, it will make poor driving decisions.”

Other researchers had previously hacked or spoofed vehicle’s GPS devices and wireless tire sensors.

While the short-range radars used by many self-driving cars for navigation operate in a frequency band requiring licensing, lidar systems use easily-mimicked pulses of laser light to build up a 3-D picture of the car’s surroundings and were ripe for attack.

Petit began by simply recording pulses from a commercial IBEO Lux lidar unit. The pulses were not encoded or encrypted, which allowed him to simply replay them at a later point. “The only tricky part was to be synchronized, to fire the signal back at the lidar at the right time,” he says. “Then the lidar thought that there was clearly an object there.”

Petit was able to create the illusion of a fake car, wall, or pedestrian anywhere from 20 to 350 meters from the lidar unit, and make multiple copies of the simulated obstacles, and even make them move. “I can spoof thousands of objects and basically carry out a denial of service attack on the tracking system so it’s not able to track real objects,” he says. Petit’s attack worked at distances up to 100 meters, in front, to the side or even behind the lidar being attacked and did not require him to target the lidar precisely with a narrow beam.

Petit acknowledges that his attacks are currently limited to one specific unit but says, “The point of my work is not to say that IBEO has a poor product. I don’t think any of the lidar manufacturers have thought about this or tried this.” 

Sensor attacks are not limited to just robotic drivers, of course. The same laser pointer that Petit used could carry out an equally devastating denial of service attack on a human motorist by simply dazzling her, and without the need for sophisticated laser pulse recording, generation, or synchronization equipment.

But the fact that a lidar attack could be carried out without alerting a self-driving car’s passengers is worrying. Karl Iagnemma directs the Robotic Mobility Group at MIT and is CEO of nuTonomy, a start-up focused on the development of software for self-driving cars. He says: “Everyone knows security is an issue and will at some point become an important issue. But the biggest threat to an occupant of a self-driving car today isn’t any hack, it’s the bug in someone’s software because we don’t have systems that we’re 100-percent sure are safe.”

Petit argues that it is never too early to start thinking about security. “There are ways to solve it,” he says. “A strong system that does misbehavior detection could cross-check with other data and filter out those that aren’t plausible. But I don’t think carmakers have done it yet. This might be a good wake-up call for them.”

SpaceX Falcon Heavy set to Launch in Spring of 2016

As reported by Engadget: We've heard quite a bit about the SpaceX Falcon Heavy spacecraft since it was first announced. What we haven't seen is a launch. However, it's now planned for next spring. 

Earlier this week, SpaceX vice president of mission and launch operations Lee Rosen said that the company is aiming for a "late April early May time-frame" for that first launch. Rosen also explained that the crew is finishing renovations to the Falcon Heavy's launch pad for the initial test flight. 

That's the Pad 39A that's designed to handle launches of both the Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9. The rocket was first announced back in 2011 with a launch planned for 2013 that didn't pan out. And this summer's Falcon 9 disaster pushed things back even further. 

After the first test launch, the Falcon Heavy is scheduled to carry a load of satellites for the Air Force in September 2016 under the Space Test Program (STP-2): an Integrated Payload Stack (IPS) consisting of two co-prime space vehicles (SVs), with up to six auxiliary payloads (APLs), and up to eight separate Poly-PicoSatellite Orbital Deployers (P-PODs) and cubesats.

As a refresher, the spacecraft uses 4.5 million pounds of thrust to launch and is capable of carrying a payload of 53,000 kg (116,845 lbs.) into low Earth orbit. 

NYC Teacher Arrested for Flying Drone at the U.S. Open

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: A New York City public school teacher was arrested after he flew a drone into the stands at the U.S. Open on Friday, police said.

Daniel Varley, 26 years old, was charged with reckless endangerment after he crash-landed the device in the upper stands at Louis Armstrong Stadium of the USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing just before 9 p.m., police said.

He was also charged with reckless operation of a drone and operating a drone in a New York City park outside of a prescribed area for doing so.

Mr. Varley had flown the device from a nearby park, where he was found a short time later, police said.

The drone incident happened during the second-to-last match of the night between Flavia Pennetta and Monica Niculescu.

“A little bit scary, I have to say,” Ms. Pennetta told the Associated Press, saying she initially thought it was a bomb.

Play briefly stopped while the device was inspected by police and fire personnel.

“The chair umpire just wanted to wait for an OK from the police to be able to continue, even if, truthfully, I don’t think even they knew what it was,” Ms. Pennetta told the AP.

Mr. Varley was released and issued a desk appearance ticket, police said. He could not be reached for comment.

No one was injured in the incident, officials said.