Japan’s Plan for Centimeter-Resolution GPS – IEEE Spectrum

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constellation of seven satellites—enough for sustainable operation and some redundancy

The four satellites will follow an orbit that, from the perspective of a person in Japan, traces an asymmetrical figure eight in the sky. While the orbit extends as far south as Australia at its widest arc, it is designed to narrow its path over Japan so that at least one satellite is always in view high in the sky—hence the name quasi-zenith. This will enable users in even the shadowed urban canyons of Tokyo to receive the system’s error-correcting signals.

“Errors can be caused, for example, by the satellite’s atomic clock, orbital shift, and by Earth’s atmosphere, especially the ionosphere, which can bend the signal, reducing its speed,” says Sato.

To correct the errors, a master control center compares the satellite’s signals received by the reference stations with the distance between the stations and the satellite’s predicted location. These corrected components are compressed from an overall 2-megabit-per-second data rate to 2 kilobits per second and transmitted to the satellite, which then broadcasts them to users’ receivers.

via Japan’s Plan for Centimeter-Resolution GPS – IEEE Spectrum.

How a Chinese Company 3D-Printed Ten Houses In a Single Day

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using massive 3D printers; in Shanghai, it’s 490 feet long, 33 feet wide, and 20 feet deep. Rather than expensive plastic, though, the Chinese company WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co is printing with a concrete aggregate "made in part from recycled construction waste, industrial waste, and tailings," according to the Architect’s Newspaper. Each of these homes costs less than $5,000.

via How a Chinese Company 3D-Printed Ten Houses In a Single Day.

Waze under attack: Israeli students fake traffic jam on popular map app – National Israel News | Haaretz

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A software program the two wrote created a fake traffic jam that lasted for hours, causing many fake drivers to take detours. To avoid causing real traffic jams and affecting real drivers, the two manufactured a backup on the quiet main road through the Technion campus in Haifa. But according to their faculty advisor, Prof. Eran Yahav, the program could just as easily have created a fake traffic jam on any other road in Israel and thereby caused Waze to report erroneous information to its customers.

via Waze under attack: Israeli students fake traffic jam on popular map app – National Israel News | Haaretz.

HT Aviv

The Practical Path to Driverless Cars – Richard Morgan – The Atlantic Cities

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Nobody dies when Siri doesn’t understand what you’re saying. But what if Siri were your chauffeur? … Would you trust Google Translate at 100 miles per hour?

via The Practical Path to Driverless Cars – Richard Morgan – The Atlantic Cities.

Tampa, FL seeks to lead the driverless car movement. They have traffic infrastructure from the 70s or so. There have been brainstorming workshops for devising a practical path.

If Savanna Animals Took the Subway – Jenny Xie – The Atlantic Cities

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Quite a few creatures have wound up on our trains over the years. In a new digital photo project called Animetro, photographers Clarisse Rebotier and Thomas Subtil imagine an even wilder Paris Metro, roaming with animals from the savanna.

via If Savanna Animals Took the Subway – Jenny Xie – The Atlantic Cities.

Millesime Gallery in Paris.

The War Between Uber and Lyft Will Be Won With an Algorithm – CityLab

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Lyft’s new VP of data science, Chris Pouliot, previously led the data analysis team at Netflix, which is known for utilizing the heck out of its user data. He’s got big plans for Lyft, too. "We can use data to provide more accurate [estimated times of arrival] when a passenger requests a ride, to set high expectations and provide a better user experience," Pouliot told VentureBeat in December. "The success or failure of the business is highly correlated to how the company uses data." He also hopes to make an algorithm that predicts the likelihood that someone nearby will need a car in the next three minutes. That way, each individual is sent a ride that’s convenient for them as well as the entire user base. The drivers-as-friends shtick might get a software boost, too: Pouliot imagines that a Facebook connection could tell passengers about interests they have in common with their driver.

Uber has a current job listing for a "leading data scientist," so it could be that they’re still trying to get their own Pouliot-level analytics whiz.

via The War Between Uber and Lyft Will Be Won With an Algorithm – CityLab.

So You Think You’re Smarter Than A CIA Agent : Parallels : NPR

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For the past three years, Rich and 3,000 other average people have been quietly making probability estimates about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics as part of the Good Judgment Project, an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community.

In fact, she’s so good she’s been put on a special team with other superforecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.

Rich and her teammates are that good even though all the information they use to make their predictions is available to anyone with access to the Internet.

When I asked if she goes to obscure Internet sources, she shook her head no.

“Usually I just do a Google search,” she said.

It turned out that most of the guesses were really bad — way too high or way too low.

But when Galton averaged them together, he was shocked:The dead ox weighed 1,198 pounds. The crowd’s average: 1,197.

via So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent : Parallels : NPR.