October 10, 2009 @ 7:13 pm
This ad from Kaiser Permanente called “Emerald Cities” imagines what the world might look like if paper medical records went digital. The company argues that many trees would be saved and possibly growing in the middle of our roads. The ad might not make perfect sense, but it’s nice anyway.
Watch the video below (or at Motionographer).
June 27, 2009 @ 7:57 pm
Photo: NASA/JSC
When I first saw this photo on The Big Picture I seriously thought it was a set of pie charts on a spreadsheet. It turns out that it’s actually a bunch of roads and circular fields in Egypt.
June 23, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
Billy Rennekamp made this looping video of a highway clover from Google Streetview. If you’re curious, the highway here is I-265 to I-71 (and back again…and so on and so forth). [via]
April 30, 2009 @ 12:38 am
GOOD has some nice photos of traffic in Los Angeles from photographer Benny Chan who took the photos over the course of several years in helicopter trips over the city. The nice thing is that GOOD is offering pretty large versions of each picture so that you can see detail in full.
April 22, 2009 @ 2:00 pm
I found this video from Streetfilms about L.A.’s traffic control system very fascinating. The video is narrated by Bill J. Shao, a senior engineer at ATSAC Operations which stands for Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control.
He talks about how L.A.’s traffic control system is pretty much completely automated now, with only 1 or 2 personnel required to monitor the computers that do all of the calculations and whatnot in terms of traffic. The computer system automatically gives priority to public transportation and can adjust to almost any type of traffic situation such as accidents and congestion. The entire system is also a great tool for the city of Los Angeles to mine traffic data, as every bit of information that goes through the system gets collected and compiled to show how heavy traffic is and how slow/fast traffic is moving.
I couldn’t embed the video, so you’ll have to watch it here.
November 26, 2008 @ 10:36 am
The 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems had a convention last week (Nov. 16-20) at the Javits Center in New York City and they literally closed off a section of 11th Avenue to show off some of the technologies being developed to make the roads safer for everybody.
The cars shown in the video “talk” wirelessly with the road, traffic signals, and pedestrians around them and are smart enough to avoid a serious accident and even automatically stop the car if the driver fails to do so. The system makes use of dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) to find other objects around the vehicle, but I cannot help but think about how this sort of technology would affect a city like New York where vehicles purposely come within inches of hitting each other in order to keep moving. I do this sort of thing often and I would hate it if a computer in my car told me that I was going to hit a vehicle when I know I am able to squeeze by without even a scratch.
But of course, the life-saving capabilities of such technology overshadow the annoyance stated above, so for that, I’ll go with this and say that I think it’s pretty neat.
