Ford’s open-source kit brings era of smart car apps – tech – 24 January 2013 – New Scientist

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MIRROR, signal, manoeuvre – now set your engine to "supercar". Car maker Ford has just released OpenXC – an open-source hardware and software toolkit that will let the hacker community play around with the computer systems that run modern cars. While the first apps may add nothing more exciting than internet radio, the open nature of the system should eventually lead to custom apps that give drivers far more control over their car’s performance.

via Ford's open-source kit brings era of smart car apps – tech – 24 January 2013 – New Scientist.

OpenXC is a combination of open source hardware and software that lets you extend your vehicle with custom applications and pluggable modules. It uses standard, well-known tools to open up a wealth of data from the vehicle to developers.

via OpenXC.

2013: In which we won the MIT Mystery Hunt

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Half a week later and despite the lack of sleep, the memories of the MIT Mystery Hunt are starkly fresh. I am incredibly happy and honored to be a part of the small group of hunters to solve the meta puzzle that ended the 2013 Mystery Hunt.

But the team that was, whose name due I suppose to the lack of character limit in the registration form and too much creativity was the entire text of Atlas Shrugged, was called by the Sages and asked, “Would your team agree to stop if the team that was currently in the lead was given the coin?” Other lead teams were given the same option. This was a huge break of competition format, and a question as impossible to answer as some of these puzzles. [Shrugged] was close to the Indiana Jones metapuzzle answer involving decoding a huge calendar wheel of dates, but had been given a wrong response to a yes/no hint question asking if half of their data was right. When they get a second call from HQ correcting the mistake, they turned down the offer to stop Hunting and pressed on. Five minutes later, John Galt and friends did get the fifth of six round answers and headed off for the last task, the runaround.

via 2013: The Year the Mystery Hunt Broke | Wired Magazine | Wired.com.

Sunday night and beyond, Twitter saturated with good-natured frustration about hunt. My favorites:

Damn it, someone win the mystery hunt. (@dbfclark)

Find the damn coin. #MysteryHunt (@gemini6ice)

dear god how much longer? #mysteryhunt (@roydraging)

Holy shit they just mad[e] it so you can skip an entire round in order to end this thing. This is trouble #MysteryHunt (@jmgold)

This #mysteryhunt is so long that it’s spanning two presidential terms. (@Jeffurry312)

Appropriate that the team with the longest name won the #mysteryhunt with the longest duration. (@mersiamnot)

Winning was awesome and, even better: by the end, many of the other teams thanked us for winning (and thereby ending the hunt).

[Image credit: lroyden]

75 hours and 19 minutes, the longest in Mystery Hunt history. I learned so much, got to know a bunch of cool people, and am so happy to be a part of it all.

Drivers With Hands Full Get a Backup – The Car – NYTimes.com

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Four manufacturers — Volvo, BMW, Audi and Mercedes — have announced that as soon as this year they will begin offering models that will come with sensors and software to allow the car to drive itself in heavy traffic at speeds up to 37 miles per hour. The systems, known as Traffic Jam Assist, will follow the car ahead and automatically slow down and speed up as needed, handling both braking and steering.

via Drivers With Hands Full Get a Backup – The Car – NYTimes.com.

My visions are being realized. Are there other splashes to make? Where do I fit in the picture?

Should We Tax People for Being Annoying? – NYTimes.com

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Republican economists, like Mankiw, normally oppose tax increases, but many support Pigovian taxes because, in some sense, we are already paying them. We pay the tax in the form of the overcrowded roads, higher insurance premiums, smog and global warming.

via Should We Tax People for Being Annoying? – NYTimes.com.

Pigovian tax

The Places You’ll Go – James Fallows – The Atlantic

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The major change in mapping in the past decade, as opposed to in the previous 6,000 to 10,000 years, is that mapping has become personal.

There’s an Android app we’ve released called Field Trip. You download it, and it says, “I don’t want to bother you, so how often should I talk to you?” You tell it “all the time” or “rarely” or whatever, and then you turn off your phone and put it in your pocket and don’t think about it again.

Then when you’re walking around, say in Washington, D.C., the phone will buzz and say, “You are 25 feet from an accurate map of 2,700 solar objects. If you go over there to the Einstein Memorial, you can see them.” Or you might be walking down the street and it will beep and say, “The rowhouse one block to the left is the No. 1–rated Greek restaurant within 500 miles,” or maybe: “Around the corner behind you is where a scene from your favorite movie was filmed.” It is using your location to search in a database of “interesting things,” and it learns what kinds of things you care about. It means having your life enlightened by travel knowledge, everywhere, or getting to walk around with local experts who know your tastes, wherever in the world you go.

via The Places You’ll Go – James Fallows – The Atlantic.

2013: The year of the Internet of Things | MIT Technology Review

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Each year in Australia, for example, biologists plant a million or so plots of different types of grain to see which grow best in a wide variety of conditions. These plots are situated all over the country and create a logistical nightmare for the relatively small team who must monitor both the environmental conditions and the rate of growth of the plants. Their solution is a wireless sensor network that monitors what’s going on and sends the data back to the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre in Canberra which runs the experiments. These sensors are currently deployed at just 40 sites and generate some 2 million data points per week.

Various cities have kitted out their transport networks with sensors that broadcast the position of buses, trams and trains and make this data available to the public.

via 2013: The year of the Internet of Things | MIT Technology Review.

Is Apple Plotting A Route To A Waze Acquisition? Rumours On The Road Point To Yes | TechCrunch

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Another source confirms that negotiations are advanced, but Waze wants $750M and Apple is willing to do $400M plus $100m in incentives. Waze had less than $1M in revenues last year primarily from ads. Negotiations may take awhile.

via Is Apple Plotting A Route To A Waze Acquisition? Rumours On The Road Point To Yes | TechCrunch.