Alex Reid

Car accidents are a leading cause of death, especially for younger people.

In 2005, the UN said that the number of road traffic deaths and injuries would exceed the damage wrought by HIV by the year 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) predicted that that road traffic injuries will rise to become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030.

Most of all, it’s human error that often causes accidents.

Nevada became the first jurisdiction in the world to allow autonomus vehicles on public roads last month. For the past few years, DARPA has been driving (no pun intended) towards driverless vehicles (think robot soldiers), and Google was behind the lobbying so that they could test their driverless project, which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Sebastian Thrun on Google’s driverless car (Youtube).

Google wouldn’t say why they choose Nevada, and while it could be that the Google founders like Burning Man, the state is known for its testing grounds – nuclear weapons and rocket cars.

Google has ben testing a fleet of seven vehicles, consisting of six Toyota Prii and an Audi TT. Their software drives the vehicles at the speed limit it has stored on its maps and maintains its distance from other vehicles using its system of sensors. The system provides an override that allows a human driver to take control of the car by stepping on the brake or turning the wheel, similar to cruise control systems already in cars. (source)

Most auto technology already uses sensors and cameras, but most of the advances available have simply been corrective or assisting technologies like the “Lane Keep Assist” ability of the 2010 Toyota Prius that uses a camera to detect lane markers and automatically steers the car toward the center of the lane.

Google says they’re just playing around with the idea, and no matter the commercial value of such an idea, the social benefits alone in preventing car accidents, by drunk or other human error, is an idea beyond worth merit.  I see this as a positive alternative for drunk drivers, but chauffeurs might be out of work soon.

Safety is the sell here, and it may still be simply an assisting program, but even with the risk of computer error, I see huge potential for this to revolutionise the auto market and save lives.

Somehow I suspect the built in GPS sytem will be Google Earth.

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner has just released the final report of her Office’s consultations on the subject of Online Tracking, Profiling and Targeting, and Cloud Computing.

Jennifer Stoddart said:

“Most people have no idea about the rich trail of data they leave behind when they browse the Internet, use social networking sites, or engage the geo-location functions of their mobile devices,” the Commissioner said.

Organizations that track the online activities of Canadians must be more upfront about their practices, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has concluded… “it comes down to meaningful consent, which entails informed consent”.

Montreal web developer and blogger Cedric Sam put together a brilliant Google Map mashup displaying election results of each of the 308 federal ridings – poll by poll!

He “used cartographic data from the Geogratis.gc.ca website. I imported the Shapefiles to a PostgreSQL database with Postgis. Then, I processed results by polling divisions from the 2008 election, data available on the Elections Canada website. It was put in a separate table on the same database. A custom program in Python using the very handy libkml (a code library developed and supported by Google) took the data and outputted pretty KML code. It was packed as a KMZ and uploaded to my webspace. [E-mail me, if you want to exchange ideas on the code]

The webpage itself is rich in JavaScript and the code can be seen here. I use hashes to make the webpage bookmarkable and loadable with a given riding pre-loaded.”

Sam has a lot of cool things going on, check out his blog here: http://smurfmatic.net/blog/

New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been pushing for more public information to be handed over to geeks to achieve three goals; more civic transparency, offering more services for less money and promoting the city as the next tech mecca.

For the second year in a row, the City of New York has embarked on a call to arms to geeks with its own annual data competition, releasing over 350 public data sets and asking tech companies to make apps that are not only useful but may be the basis of the next Google or Facebook.

This year’s $10,000 grand prize went to Roadify, an app that sends alerts to mobile phones about subway, bus, and driving conditions, allowing users to add comments and real-time updates as they commute.

It isn’t just about the money though, it’s about the pride and attention. Some of the competition judges included Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai.

Some of the finalists included DontEat.at, an app that sends a text message when you check in to a restaurant that has a risk of being closed for health code violations; Sportaneous, a geo-map app that helps users find and join pick-up games close to them with other users that match their skill level; and Parking Finder, an app that locates nearby parking garages and their parking rates.

Edmonton is getting their own Hackathon, a codefest where developers, programmers, engineers, designers and even marketers get together for a collaborative technical project.

This isn’t the first for Edmonton or Alberta, as the first hackathon happened in Calgary in 1999, focusing on cryptographic development (according to wikipedia, “part of the reason for holding it in Canada was to avoid legal problems caused by United States regulations on the export of cryptographic software”).

This hackathon – sponsored by Microsoft – will focus on creating an emergency information application that can be used “in cities all over the world. An application that will help families prepare during a disaster. An app that will list emergency muster points, emergency info, alerts during disasters, and what you can do.”

This is Edmonton’s third official hackathon to take place at 9:15am Wednesday, October 20th, and continue until 9:15am Thursday, October 21st. To join this hackathon, click here.