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VW Fiasco Puts Ethics In Engineering Under the Spotlight, CEO Steps Down 569

Posted by timothy from the well-it's-been-talked-about-plenty dept.
szczys writes: By now you've heard that VW has been accused of doctoring the software in their small diesel models to sidestep emissions standards. The thing that hasn't been talked about is engineering ethics. An algorithm in the code detects when the vehicle is under test conditions and causes it to perform differently. This couldn't have been accomplished by just one person. Brian Benchoff looks at the conditions leading up to the scandal and discusses the engineering ethics involved. Automotive engineers are held to a higher standard because mistakes and cut corners can kill people. This kind of suspected deceit goes well beyond concerns of environmental damage. Willing ethics violations challenge our trust of the engineering as a whole. Volkswagen‘s chief executive Martin Winterkorn has announced he is stepping down.

Submission + - Postal Trucks to Become Sensor Platforms? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Postal Service may face insolvency by 2011 (it lost $8.5 billion last year). An op-ed piece in today's New York Times proposes an interesting business idea for the Postal Service: use postal trucks as a giant fleet of mobile sensor platforms. (Think Google Streetview on steroids.) The trucks could be outfitted with a variety of sensors (security, environmental, RF ...) and paid for by businesses. The article's author addresses some of the obvious privacy concerns that arise.

Submission + - CRTC to Allow Usage Based Billing (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Idiomatick
Idiomatick writes: The CRTC ruled in favour today for usage based billing. Bell Canada was given a monopoly on lines in Canada, in exchange they were made to resell to competitors at cost in order to have a functional market. The new CRTC ruling will allow Bell to charge their competitors more money based on individual customer usage. They are now able to implement a 60GB cap on a competitor's highest speed lines (charging $1.12/GB for overages). Bell however; it was ruled that they are permitted to continue with it's unlimited usage plan. The effect on the market seems clear.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Induction cooktop fun

Submitted by fishfrys
fishfrys writes: Besides generating heat quickly and efficiently in ferromagnetic pans, what sorts of fun things can you do with an induction cooktop? This seems like a pretty serious piece of electromagnetic equipment — boiling water can't be the only thing it's good for. I went to youtube expecting to find all sorts of crazy videos of unsafe induction cooktop shenanigans, but only found cooking. What sort of exciting, if not stupid, physics experiments can be performed with one? Hard drive scrubber... DIY Tesla coil? There's got to be something. Thanks.
Science

Submission + - Stopping Malaria By Immunizing Bugs (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Millions of people in the tropics suffer from malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that has been difficult to treat and which costs many developing countries millions of dollars per year in lost productivity. Up to now, efforts at controlling it have focused on attacking the parasites that cause it, keeping mosquitoes from biting, or killing the insects.

But at Johns Hopkins University, Rhoel Dinglasan, an entomologist and biologist, decided to try another tack: immunizing mosquitoes. ...

When a mosquito bites an infected human, it takes up some of the gametocytes.They aren't dangerous to people at that stage. Since plasmodium is vulnerable there, and that is the point that Dinglasan chose to attack.

A mosquito's gut has certain receptor molecules in it that the plasmodium can bind to. Dinglasan asked what would happen if the parasite couldn't "see" them, which would happen if another molecule, some antigen, were binding to those receptors.
NASA

Submission + - How to Deflect an Asteroid with Today's Technology

Submitted by Matt_dk
Matt_dk writes: Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart is among an international group of people championing the need for the human race to prepare for what will certainly happen one day: an asteroid threat to Earth. Schweickart said the technology is available today to send a mission to an asteroid in an attempt to move it, or change its orbit so that an asteroid that threatens to hit Earth will pass by harmlessly. What would such a mission entail?
Microsoft

Submission + - Researchers test WiFi access from moving vehicles (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Massachusetts have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle. The technology is dubbed Wiffler and earlier this year its creators took it for a test drive with some interesting results. Although the researchers determined that a reliable public WiFi hotspot would be available to their test vehicles only 11% of the time, the Wiffler protocol was able to offload almost 50% of the data from 3G to WiFi.
Science

Submission + - Kiwi scientists make atomic 'breakthrough' (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by Mogster
Mogster writes: "University of Otago scientists have made a "major physics breakthrough" with the development of a technique to consistently isolate and capture a fast-moving single atom. A team of four researchers from the university's physics department are believed to be the first to isolate and photograph the Rubidium 85 atom"

Good to see Kiwi's following in Rutherford's footsteps
Idle

Submission + - Resort Attracts Men with Virtual Girlfriends (discovery.com)

Submitted by disco_tracy
disco_tracy writes: Long a favorite of lovers and honeymooners, a Japanese beach town with fading sparkle has found a new tourism niche in the wired age. A resort based on a game called "Love Plus," encourages players to develop long-term relationships with virtual women.

Submission + - Flight Data Recorders, decades out of date (ieee.org)

Submitted by
Tisha_AH
Tisha_AH writes: "For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant. Some of the advances of cloud computing, mesh radio networks, real-time position reporting and satellite communications are held back by a combination of aircraft manufacturers, pilots unions and the slow gears of government bureaucracy. Many recent aircraft loss incidents remain unexplained with black boxes lost on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, buried under the wreckage of the World Trade Centers or with critical information suppressed by government secrecy or aircraft manufacturers.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black-box/0

Many recorders still rely upon tape recorders for voice and data that only record a very small sampling of aircraft dynamics, flight and engine systems or crew behaviors. For many aircraft the recorders can only log a hour or two of data before overwriting the tape. All recording stops if the main electrical system fails and there is the ever present circuit breaker in the cockpit that can shut the system down.

Technologically simple solutions like battery backup, continual telemetry feeds by satellite and hundreds of I/O points, monitoring many systems should be within easy reach. An example of an extensive (but still primitive) recording system was during the loss of the NASA Columbia space shuttle. This vessel was equipped with a much larger assortment of monitoring points as it was used as a test-bed during shuttle development. Without the extensive forensic analysis of the telemetry data it would have been nearly impossible to reconstruct the accident in such detail. http://spaceflightnow.com/columbia/report/030826crew/

Pilots unions have objected to the collection and sharing of detailed accident data, citing privacy concerns of the flight crew. Accidents may be due to human errror, process problems or design flaws. Unless we can fully evaluate all factors involved in transportation accidents (aircraft, maritime, rail, transit) it will be difficult to improve the safety record. Recommendations by the NTSB to the FAA have gone unheeded for many years. http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/bitstreams/3687.pdf

With all of the technological advancements that we work with in the IT field what sort of best practices could be brought forward in transit safety?"

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