Why Carmakers Always Insisted on Male Crash-Test Dummies — Taming the American Idol 2014-01-04 But a female dummy didn’t become a mandatory part of frontal crash tests until last year. For all this time, the average American guy stood for us all. That may have had a substantial impact on women’s auto safety. If airbags are designed for the average male, they will strike most men in the upper chest, creating ...

Bay Area sets transit spending targets – SFGate 2013-12-23 Regional transportation officials approved a spending strategy Wednesday that will concentrate the bulk of spending on public transportation for the next four decades on the Bay Area’s largest systems: Muni, BART, AC Transit and, to a lesser degree, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. via Bay Area sets transit spending targets – SFGate. Well, this sounds good!

Toyota Licenses Wireless Charging Tech from WiTricity – IEEE Spectrum 2013-12-09 One of the major companies in inductive charging infrastructure is Qualcomm, which acquired wireless vehicle charging technology from London-based HaloIPT two years ago. Now called Qualcomm’s Halo division, the company intends to run a trial in London with wireless charging pads on parking spots and cars equipped with sensors to indicate they are aligned above ...

Google and robots: The future just got a lot closer | Internet & Media – CNET News 2013-12-09 Over the last half-year, Google has quietly acquired seven technology companies in an effort to create a new generation of robots. And the engineer heading the effort is Andy Rubin, the man who built Google’s Android software into the world’s dominant force in smartphones. Among the companies are Schaft, a small team of Japanese roboticists who ...

In a First, Police Ticket a Driver Wearing Google Glass | Autopia | Wired.com 2013-11-01 Abadie was driving in San Diego when an officer pulled her over for speeding. The primary infraction was for going 15 mph over the speed limit, but there was a secondary offense scrawled on the ticket: “driving w/ monitor visible to driver (Google Glass).” via In a First, Police Ticket a Driver Wearing Google Glass | ...

Rodney Brooks on Cars as Robots – Forbes 2013-10-25 CTO Rodney Brooks would say. “I tell everyone, ‘You’re driving around inside a robot, and 10 years from now it’s going to become an even smarter robot,’” Brooks told us at our Techonomy Detroit conference. “Cars are the epicenter, actually, of robotics.” via Rodney Brooks on Cars as Robots – Forbes.

Privacy Collision: Driver Monitoring Tech Also Great For Tracking Movement | The Security Ledger 2013-10-02 With knowledge just of the origin of a trip, they found, they could accurately predict the destination of the journey absent any GPS data. They accomplished this using a strategy they called “stop-point matching,” on the theory that the pattern of stop points from a known origin will be more or less unique for any ...