Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Rachel Swaby

In a race between a self-driving car and a pro race-car driver, who wins?

Rachel Swaby, The Atlantic — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:50:09 -0400

A self-driving car and a seasoned race-car driver each speed around Northern California's three-mile Thunderhill Raceway loop. Which car will get the fastest time?

Before you place your bets, a little setup: Send a pro out on a racetrack, and the driver will automatically find what is mathematically the quickest route around it. They navigate with such adept muscle memory that elite drivers can handle sudden changes in friction on the road without increasing cognitive workload.

The autonomous vehicle is a creation from the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). "We tried to model [the self-driving car] after what we've learned from the best race-car drivers," explained Chris Gerdes, the program's director, yesterday at The Atlantic's Big Science Summit in San Jose, California.

So who would win in a battle between skilled human and a wheeled robot imitator? Humans, of course. But only by a few measly seconds.

"What the human drivers do is consistently feel out the limits of the car and push it just a little bit farther," explained Gerdes. "When you look at what the car is capable of and what humans achieve, that gap is really actually small."

Is there life beyond Earth? 'I think absolutely,' says NASA JPL Director

Rachel Swaby, The Atlantic — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:00:00 -0400

Charles Elachi, Director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech, doesn't hesitate when he's asked about life beyond earth. "Personally, I think absolutely," he said today at The Atlantic's Big Science Summit in San Jose, California. "We have the same laws of chemistry, physics. If there are any locations where there are the basic ingredients, there should be the basic ingredients for life."

One ingredient, of course, is water. On Mars, images from orbit show what looks like dried up drainage channels. Elachi compares them to the patterns you can see as you fly over Egypt's desert -- an imprint that marks where water once was. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity found other hints of water on Mars as well. "We found rocks that have been modified by the presence of water," he said.

It would be ideal, of course, if NASA's newest arrival on Mars, the Curiosity rover, were to stumble upon a fossil. But absent that, NASA will continue gathering data, looking for signs of that something might have lived 127 million miles away. Much of the intense interest, says Elachi, spring from the similarities between Earth and Mars. "They have similar initial conditions. One went this way and and the other went that way. How did life start on this planet [Mars] and somehow stop? Or it never started?"

The automation of our skies: How computers could resolve flight delays

Rachel Swaby, The Atlantic — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:32:28 -0400

Three-quarters of flight delays are due to weather. While we can't convince SFO's fog to burn off according to our schedules, there most certainly is a better way to plan around it. At The Atlantic's Big Science Summit in San Jose, California, Parimal Kopardekar, the principal investigator at NASA's NextGen Airspace Project, explained that by pulling data -- weather forecasts, ground-based forecasts, readings from sensors placed outside planes -- a model could be created to predict the best course of action for any particular flight.

With enough information, says Kopardekar, the system could see "automation that detects and resolves conflicts." A computer could figure out, for instance, whether it would be faster to wait for ten minutes on the tarmac for a storm to pass or take off immediately and make a slight detour in the air. That kind of data-based decision making could work not just for departures, but for arrivals, too, so a flight from New York to San Francisco could be timed to arrive right as the Bay Area's fog clears.

The password fallacy: Why our security system is broken, and how to fix it

Rachel Swaby, The Atlantic — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 08:55:00 -0400

For the few that haven't yet spotted technology journalist Mat Honan's story about his unfortunate hacking, here's the capsule version: What started as an attempt at his Twitter feed via an Amazon account security hole quickly escalated into several wiped devices, a gutted Gmail account, and devastating data loss, both personally and professionally. The terrifying tale ended on a cry for users to embrace Google's two-step verification, which requires a second level of authentication when accessing your Gmail. When James Fallows wrote about his wife's ordeal with a compromised account last year, he came to the same conclusion.

Sure, adding an extra lock would have spared both a fair amount of trouble, but there's a much bigger problem at hand. We're required to take downright ridiculous precautions to maintain our online security, and it's not sustainable. In fact, it never was. Our password system is broken, and it's about time we change it.

Let's take a little tally of where we've found ourselves, shall we? Studies show that we log into some 10 sites a day. Places that hold our most important data, like Gmail, Dropbox, and our bank, might ask us to jump through two tiers of password hoops in order for them to ensure our online security. Overall we're asked to hold keys to 30-40 sites in order to read the news, access our email, or book a haircut. For each of these sites, security analysts recommend using a unique string of 14-characters made up of letters, numbers, and special symbols. But remember: Computers are quick to guess dictionary words, your birth year, and numbers substituted for letters. No repeats allowed. Oh, and whatever you do, don't write anything down.

Who can possibly remember all those characters?

It's a nutty system, so we ignore it, spreading the five or six passwords that we can remember across every online interaction. But that's not a good solution. Connect our sites with shared login information, and we're risking enormous chunks of our online lives. As Steve Ragan, a journalist at The Tech Herald demonstrated in January, a free program and a $300 computer can crack more than 25,000 passwords in seven minutes. Perhaps XKCD said it best: "Through 20 years of effort, we've successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess."

Read the full story at The Atlantic.

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