Cities Should Be Designed for People Instead of Cars

traffic jam

Public transportation in most American cities is insufficient in many ways. Cars are typically the only way to properly get around a city. It would be great if public transportation was well funded and innovative instead of stagnant. Unfortunately, most cities were developed with cars in mind and few provisions for public transportation.

“There’s this cycle of automobile dependency,” he said. “You have to have a place to park at home, a place to park at work, and a place to park at retail establishments.” In an absurd “market distortion,” cities have become places where “cars have a right to housing and people don’t.”

That distortion, he says, is the result of years of increasing capacity for automobiles and shifting funds away from alternative forms of transportation. It’s brought us to the point where most Americans consider automobile ownership an essential key to a productive, fulfilling life. Papandreou suggests a sea change in how we view personal mobility.

It’s Time for Cities to Favor People, Not Cars article from Wired.

Graph of Historical Stock Market Crashes Based on Percentage Lost

graph of historical market crashes

This graph puts the current bear market into perspective.

Link

Time Magazine’s 25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis

View the blameworthy.

IBM Cognitive Computing Research Team is Reverse Engineering the Brain

The IBM Team that won the DARPA SyNAPSE Cognitive Computing Contract has a sensible approach to new hardware architectures and machine learning.

“The plan is to engineer the mind by reverse-engineering the brain,” says Dharmendra Modha, manager of the cognitive computing project at IBM Almaden Research Center.

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One of the main challenges to building this system in hardware, explains Boahen, is that each neuron connects to others through 8,000 synapses. It takes about 20 transistors to implement a synapse, so building the silicon equivalent of 220 trillion synapses is a tall order, indeed.

“You end up with a technology where the cost is very unfavorable,” says Boahen. “That’s why we have to use nanotech to implement synapses in a way that will make them much smaller and more cost-effective.”

Boahen and his team are trying to create a device smaller than a single transistor that can do the job of 20 transistors. “We are essentially inventing a new device,” he says.

Meanwhile, at the University of California-Merced, Kello and his team are creating a virtual environment that could train the simulated brain to experience and learn. They are using the Unreal Tournament videogame engine to help train the system. When it’s ready, it will be used to teach the neural networks how to make decisions and learn along the way.

Wired Article Cognitive Computing Project Aims to Reverse-Engineer the Mind

More info about the DARPA Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) contract.