Category: Safety

Posted on

From Ars Technica: DEA installs license-plate recognition devices near Southwest border

This story was produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Learn more at www.cironline.org. Contact the reporter at gwschulz@cironline.org.

In their unending battle to deter illegal immigration, drug trafficking and terrorism, U.S. authorities already have beefed up border security with drug-sniffing dogs, aircraft, and thousands more agents manning interior checkpoints.

Now, the US Drug Enforcement Administration has decided it wants more, and the Justice Department agency doesn’t care whether someone has even set foot in Mexico.

 

from Ars Technica

Posted on

From Autoblog: Video: This is how good car crashing in video games is about to become

Filed under: , ,

It is evident even with the most realistic car games that crashes have mainly been left off of the realism menu. Sure, hit a wall or another car and there will be some damage and crumpling, but it usually doesn’t look like a genuine car crash. A start-up company called BeamNG is working to change that, developing a physics modification for the Cry Engine 3 to create wrecks that appear to be lifted from a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash-test video.

They team has been at it for a while, and the latest multicore version shows off one- and two-car collisions that feature shattering glass and more realistic deformations. They’re still at work on it and have promised more improvements, but the video belowshows off just how real things are about to get in the world of video games. Well, once a game maker decides to use the Cry Engine 3 for a driving game, that is…

 

from Autoblog

Posted on

From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: At the Imagine Cup 2012: A Real-Life Minesweeper App That Detects Buried Landmines

Team ARMED Team ARMED from Poland post with their bomb-detecting smartphones and a model of the land mines it finds. Julie Beck

Using both the military and software sides of their education, a team of Polish military students studying computer engineering at Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna (Military University of Technology) presented at the Imagine Cup here in Sydney an app that uses the built-in magnetometer in a Windows phone to detect the magnetic signature of land mines buried in the ground.

SAPER (Sensor Amplified Perception for Explosives Recognition) is Poland’s entry in the software design category of the 2012 Imagine Cup.

It’s like a high-stakes Minesweeper with real-world results. The corresponding web application shows the locations of mines users have already detected, or whose known locations were input by military professionals. Then, if you enter a dangerous area, the app sends you a notification on your phone.

SAPER has 75 percent accuracy in detecting land mines, and works from 30 centimeters away. However, both of these stats can be improved by purchasing their external, more powerful magnetometer/metal detector, for “premium users,” which the team says makes the app comparable in accuracy to current military tools. Being from a military academy, Team ARMED had access to a field test site, where they buried mines in the ground and tested their app on them.

The team hopes to first deploy their app in the most affected areas, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam and Croatia, where, team mentor Mariusz Chmielewski tells me, there are regularly “bombs on the side of the road you are driving on. It is a big, big problem.”

 

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

Posted on

From Engadget: Carnegie Mellon smart headlight prototype blacks out raindrops for clearer view of the road

DNP Carnegie Mellon headlight prototype blacks out raindrops for clearer view of the road

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon have developed a prototype smart headlight which blots out individual drops of rain or snow — improving vision by up to 90 percent. Made with an off-the-shelf Viewsonic DLP projector, a quad-core Intel Core-i7 PC and a GigE Point Grey Flea3 camera, the Rube Goldberg-esque process starts by first imaging raindrops arriving at the top of its view. After this, the signal goes to a processing unit, which uses a predictive theory developed by the team to guess the drops’ path to the road. Finally, the projector — found in the same place as the camera — uses a beamsplitter like modern digital 3D rigs. Used in tandem with calculations, it transmits a beam with light voids matching the predicted path. The result? It all stops light from hitting the falling particles, with the cumulative process resulting in the illusion of a nearly precipitation-free road view — at least in the lab. So far, the whole process takes about a hundredth of a second (13 ms) but scientists said that in an actual car and with many more drops, the speed would have to be about ten times quicker. That would allow 90 percent of the light located 13 feet in front of the headlights to pass through, but even at just triple the speed, it would give drivers a 70 percent better view. To see if this tech might have a snowflake’s chance of making it out of the lab, go past the break for all the videos.

 

from Engadget