The Science of Bike-sharing

TAU develops a high-tech tool to improve two-wheeled public transportation

The new environmentally-friendly concept of municipal “bike-sharing is taking over European cities like Paris, and American cities like New York are also looking into the idea. It allows a subscriber to “borrow” a bike from one of hundreds of locations in the city, use it, and return it to another location at the end of the journey. It’s good for commuters and for running short errands.

While the idea is gaining speed and subscribers at the 400 locations around the world where it has been implemented, there have been growing pains — partly because the projects have been so successful. About seven percent of the time, users aren’t able to return a bike because the station at their journey’s destination is full. And sometimes stations experience bike shortages, causing frustration with the system.

To solve the problem, Dr. Tal Raviv and Prof. Michal Tzur of Tel Aviv University‘s Department of Industrial Engineering are developing a mathematical model to lead to a software solution. “These stations are managed imperfectly, based on what the station managers see. They use their best guesses to move bikes to different locations around the city using trucks,” explains Dr. Raviv. “There is no system for more scientifically managing the availability of bikes, creating dissatisfaction among users in popular parts of the city.”

Their research was presented in November 2010 at the INFORMS 2010 annual meeting in Austin, Texas.

Biking with computers

An environmentalist, Dr. Raviv wants to see more cities in America adopt the bike-sharing system. In Paris alone, there are 1,700 pick-up and drop-off stations. In New York, there soon might be double or triple that amount, making the management of bike availability an extremely daunting task.

Dr. Raviv, Prof. Tzur and their students have created a mathematical model to predict which bike stations should be refilled or emptied — and when that needs to happen. In small towns with 100 stations, mere manpower can suffice, they say. But anything more and it’s really just a guessing game. A computer program will be more effective.

The researchers are the first to tackle bike-sharing system management using mathematical models and are currently developing a practical algorithmic solution. “Our research involves devising methods and algorithms to solve the routing and scheduling problems of the trucks that move fleets, as well as other operational and design challenges within this system,” says Dr. Raviv.

For the built environment

The benefits of bike-sharing programs in any city are plentiful. They cut down traffic congestion and alleviate parking shortages; reduce air pollution and health effects such as asthma and bronchitis; promote fitness; and enable good complementary public transportation by allowing commuters to ride from and to train or bus stations.

Because of the low cost of implementing bike-sharing programs, cities can benefit without significant financial outlay. And in some cities today, bicycles are also the fastest form of transport during rush hour.

The city of Tel Aviv is now in the process of deploying a bike sharing system to ease transport around the city, and improve the quality of life for its residents. Tel Aviv University research is contributing to this plan, and the results will be used in a pilot site in Israel

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Reference Link
http://www.aftau.org/site/News2/1039511600?page=NewsArticle&id=13823&news_iv_ctrl=-1

Courtesy
American Friends of Tel Aviv University

 

'Road train' technology trials get rolling

By Mark Ward

Technology correspondent, BBC News

 Legal hurdles could prevent the technology being adopted any time soon

Technology that links vehicles into “road trains” that can travel as a semi-autonomous convoy has undergone its first real world tests.

The trials held on Volvo’s test track in Sweden slaved a single car to a lorry to test the platooning system.

Trains of cars under the control of a lead driver should cut fuel use, boost safety and may even cut congestion.

Project researchers believe platoons of cars could be travelling on Europe’s roads within a decade.

Highway code

The road train test was carried out as part of a European Commission research project known as Sartre – Safe Road Trains for the Environment.

Video of the trial shows the test car travelling behind a lorry and then handing over control to that leading vehicle via in-car controls.

Drivers join and leave vehicle platoons via in-car controls

Once the lead vehicle is in charge, the driver of the car is seen taking his hands off the wheel, reading a newspaper and sipping coffee as the journey proceeds.

This is because commands to steer, speed up and slow down all come from the driver of the lead vehicle. Cars also keep an eye on their position relative to other vehicles in a platoon to ensure they keep a safe distance.

In the final system lots of cars could be slaved to a lead vehicle and travel at high speed along specific routes on motorways.

The successful test was a “major milestone” said Tom Robinson, Sartre co-ordinator at engineering firm Ricardo.

Trial participant Eric Coelingh, an engineering specialist at Volvo Cars, said: “We are very pleased to see that the various systems work so well together already the first time.”

He said Sartre brought together technology from seven firms in four different countries.

The technology behind the Sartre system could be in use in a few years, however, it may take much longer for European member nations to pass laws that allow it to be widely used.

Reference Link : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12215915

Courtesy : BBC News

Is there a genius in all of us?

Those who think geniuses are born and not made should think again, says author David Shenk.

Where do athletic and artistic abilities come from? With phrases like “gifted musician”, “natural athlete” and “innate intelligence”, we have long assumed that talent is a genetic thing some of us have and others don’t.

But new science suggests the source of abilities is much more interesting and improvisational. It turns out that everything we are is a developmental process and this includes what we get from our genes.

A century ago, geneticists saw genes as robot actors, always uttering the same lines in exactly the same way, and much of the public is still stuck with this old idea. In recent years, though, scientists have seen a dramatic upgrade in their understanding of heredity.

They now know that genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects depending on who they are talking to.

    It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything. But the new science tells us that it’s equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us”

– David Shenk Author of The Genius in All of Us

Malleable

“There are no genetic factors that can be studied independently of the environment,” says Michael Meaney, a professor at McGill University in Canada.

 “And there are no environmental factors that function independently of the genome. [A trait] emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment.”

This means that everything about us – our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities – are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of “innate” no longer holds together.

“In each case the individual animal starts its life with the capacity to develop in a number of distinctly different ways,” says Patrick Bateson, a biologist at Cambridge University.

“Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental tune it does play is selected by [the environment] in which the individual is growing up.”

Is it that genes don’t matter? Of course not. We’re all different and have different theoretical potentials from one another. There was never any chance of me being Cristiano Ronaldo. Only tiny Cristiano Ronaldo had a chance of being the Cristiano Ronaldo we know now.

But we also have to understand that he could have turned out to be quite a different person, with different abilities. His future football magnificence was not carved in genetic stone.

Doomed

This new developmental paradigm is a big idea to swallow, considering how much effort has gone into persuading us that each of us inherits a fixed amount of intelligence, and that most of us are doomed to be mediocre.

How a London cabbie’s brain grows

London cabbies famously navigate one of the most complex cities in the world.

In 1999, neurologist Eleanor Maguire conducted MRI scans on their brains and compared them with the brain scans of others.

In contrast with non-cabbies, experienced taxi drivers had a greatly enlarged posterior hippocampus – that part of the brain that specialises in recalling spatial representations.

What’s more, the size of cabbies’ hippocampi correlated directly with each driver’s experience: the longer the driving career, the larger the posterior hippocampus.

That showed that spatial tasks were actively changing cabbies’ brains. This was perfectly consistent with studies of violinists, Braille readers, meditation practitioners, and recovering stroke victims.

Our brains adapt in response to the demands we put on them.

The notion of a fixed IQ has been with us for almost a century. Yet the original inventor of the IQ test, Alfred Binet, had quite the opposite opinion, and the science turns out to favour Binet.

“Intelligence represents a set of competencies in development,” said Robert Sternberg from Tufts University in the US in 2005, after many decades of study.

Talent researchers Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin Rathunde and Samuel Whalen agree.

“High academic achievers are not necessarily born ‘smarter’ than others,” they write in their book Talented Teenagers, “but work harder and develop more self-discipline.”

James Flynn of the University of Otago in New Zealand has documented how IQ scores themselves have steadily risen over the century – which, after careful analysis, he ascribes to increased cultural sophistication. In other words, we’ve all gotten smarter as our culture has sharpened us.

Most profoundly, Carol Dweck from Stanford University in the US, has demonstrated that students who understand intelligence is malleable rather than fixed are much more intellectually ambitious and successful.

The same dynamic applies to talent. This explains why today’s top runners, swimmers, cyclists, chess players, violinists and on and on, are so much more skilful than in previous generations.

All of these abilities are dependent on a slow, incremental process which various micro-cultures have figured out how to improve. Until recently, the nature of this improvement was merely intuitive and all but invisible to scientists and other observers.

Soft and sculptable

But in recent years, a whole new field of “expertise studies”, led by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson, has emerged which is cleverly documenting the sources and methods of such tiny, incremental improvements.

Born to be a footballer?

Bit by bit, they’re gathering a better and better understanding of how different attitudes, teaching styles and precise types of practice and exercise push people along very different pathways.

Does your child have the potential to develop into a world-class athlete, a virtuoso musician, or a brilliant Nobel-winning scientist?

It would be folly to suggest that anyone can literally do or become anything. But the new science tells us that it’s equally foolish to think that mediocrity is built into most of us, or that any of us can know our true limits before we’ve applied enormous resources and invested vast amounts of time.

Our abilities are not set in genetic stone. They are soft and sculptable, far into adulthood. With humility, with hope, and with extraordinary determination, greatness is something to which any kid – of any age – can aspire.

David Shenk is the author of The Genius in All of Us.

  

Reference Link : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12140064

Courtesy : BBC News

Environmental warrior takes on industry

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Chemist and environmental activist Wilma Subra collects a water sample in Gueydan, Louisiana.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Chemist Wilma Subra helps communities fight against environmental threats
• Subra received a MacArthur genius grant for her work in 1999
• Mossville, Louisiana, “exposed to a very large quantity of very toxic chemicals,” Subra says

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Is enough being done to protect us from chemicals that could harm us? Watch “Toxic America,” a special two-night investigative report with Sanjay Gupta M.D., June 2 & 3 at 8 p.m. ET on CNN.

New Iberia, Louisiana (CNN) — Chemist Wilma Subra was working at her desk by a picture window one cool June evening in 2006 when the passenger in a passing car fired a single shot in her direction. The bullet lodged in a brick a few feet from where she was sitting.

Not your typical day at the office for a chemist, but Subra is not a typical chemist.

“I think they were just trying to scare me and get me to back off,” says Subra, a soft-spoken grandmother who has made it her life’s mission to help communities fight against chemical threats from industry.

Subra didn’t quit. She moved her desk away from the window and went back to work. The gunman was never caught.

“I can’t close up and not be out there,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Out there” means traveling to communities across the country worried about pollution.

Mossville, Louisiana: ‘Like an experiment’

“Communities need so much help, and you educate and empower them, and then they take on the fight and the issue. They just need that little bit of information to make them aware.”

Subra received a MacArthur genius grant for her work in 1999. Her almost genteel manner belies the persistence and quiet intensity she brings to her work.

Subra, 66, president of Subra Company, began as a consultant, testing in communities for government and industry. But she didn’t like not being able to tell the locals what she’d found.

“So in 1981, I said, ‘OK, it’s time for me to start doing this on behalf of the communities,” Subra says.

Working from small offices in rural New Iberia, Louisiana, Subra has about 30 active cases at any time. Some of them last for years.

Special Report: Toxic America

Surrounded by files and stacks of papers, Subra, also gets calls and e-mails with urgent questions from communities in the United States and around the world. Subra says she sometimes gets an emotional call from someone who works in industry.

“It’s someone in their family who is now sick. And they’ll start off by saying I’m so and so and I’ve never agreed with you and I’ve been on the other side, but my wife or my child is sick and I want to know what are the potential things they could have been exposed to that caused the illness,” she says. “And suddenly we can have a dialogue about what they’re exposed to … They have a complete change of attitude because they thought they would never be touched by it, and now someone in their family is being touched by it. It’s amazing.”

In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank off the coast of Louisiana, Subra has been working long hours investigating the potential environmental and human health impacts of the oil spill in the Gulf.

Her work in the past year has ranged from natural gas drilling in Dish, Texas, to groundwater contamination from oil and gas drilling in Pavilion, Wyoming. She has provided technical assistance to communities near the polluted Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco, California, and evaluated the potential environmental impacts of importing Italian nuclear waste through the port of New Orleans, Louisiana.

Her biggest victory, Subra says, came in a fight against an oil waste incinerator in Amelia, Louisiana, that began using hazardous waste and toxic wood treatment waste as fuel. “There were all kinds of illnesses in the community,” says Subra, who is from nearby Morgan City, Louisiana. Among those who got sick: grandchildren of longtime friends who developed a type of brain tumor called a neuroblastoma. After 12 years, a federal judge ordered the facility closed. Subra testified at the trial.

Much of her time has been spent in Mossville, a 200-year-old African American community in southwest Louisiana surrounded by 14 chemical plants.

“All the people there are being exposed to a very large quantity of very toxic chemicals,” Subra says.

Subra says there are thousands of communities in the United States facing environmental threats.

“Next to industrial facilities, next to paper mills, next to refineries, next to chemical plants, next to landfills, next to hazardous waste sites,” she says.

Asked if she’s a modern-day Erin Brockovich, the environmental crusader who became the subject of an Academy Award-winning movie, Wilma Subra laughs.

“I’ve been doing this since way before Erin was doing it.”

Reference Link
http://us.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/05/25/wilma.subra.enviroment/index.html?hpt=C2

Courtesy
Cable News Network