This should be obvious to anyone who rides a bicycle in a city. Alas we also have studies to prove it true, year after year:
Since the event began in 2009, one mode has ruled supreme in terms of speed.
“People on bikes have beaten their car-driving counterparts more than two-thirds of the time,” Jane says. “A lot of people are surprised by that, because they don’t realize how fast and convenient cycling for transportation can be.”
This is confirmed by a 2017 study from the German Federal Environmental Agency, which determined that–in an urban setting–bikes are faster than cars for trips up to five kilometres. As it turns out, drivers vastly underestimate time spent sitting in traffic, searching for parking, and walking to their final destination.
Two-thirds is a crushing defeat for cars, and that’s simply measuring performance. When you add in the health and environment benefits it begs the question what people really value when riding in a car in a city.
Scientific American has a nice write-up of the theoretical physicist who discovered nuclear fission and was denied credit, yet assigned blame:
While the celebrity Meitner deserved was blatantly denied her, an undeserved association with the atomic bomb was bestowed. Meitner was outright opposed to nuclear weapons: “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!” Indeed, she was the only prominent Allied physicist to refuse an invitation to work on its construction at Los Alamos.
1878 born in Vienna, Austria, third of eight children in middle-class family
1892 at age 14 offered no more school, by 19th-century Austrian standards for girls. begins private lessons
1905 earns PhD in physics from University of Vienna
1907 moves to Berlin to access modern lab for research. denied her own lab because a woman, given an office in a basement closet, forced to use bathroom in a restaurant “down the street”
1908 publishes three papers
1909 publishes six papers
1917 given salary and independent physics position
1926 first woman in Germany to be made full professor
1934 intrigued by Fermi work, begins research into nuclear reaction of uranium
1938 Nazi regime forces her to leave Germany, because Jewish
1944 Nobel prize awarded to the Berlin man who ran the lab she used for experiments
Amazing to see how determined she was and how she blazed a trail for others to do good. And yet the things she did, men wouldn’t give her credit for, while the thing she opposed was blamed on her instead.
An investigation has started to reveal that the practice of putting a distillate of petroleum (parrafin) on your body can lead to a very painful fiery death.
Firefighter Chris Bell, who is a watch commander with West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, says the actual number of deaths linked to the creams is likely to be much higher.
“Hundreds of thousands of people use them, we’re not sure how many fire deaths might have occurred but it could be into the hundreds,” he said.
His concerns were echoed by Mark Hazelton, group manager for community safety at London Fire Brigade.
He said many fire services do not have forensic investigation teams able to properly assess the role of paraffin cream in fires.
In brief, repeated use of a petroleum-based oil in a cream causes soft furniture to become filled with the highly flammable substance. It’s essentially (pun not intended) pouring gasoline on your bed and chair, albeit very very slowly. Then when a fire starts, the outcome of dousing flammable oil is predictable. Product manufacturers haven’t yet been held accountable for this alarming rise in deaths linked to their ingredients.
Artificial Intelligence, or even just Machine Learning for those who prefer organic, is influencing nearly all aspects of modern digital life. Whether it be financial, health, education, energy, transit…emphasis on performance gains and cost reduction has driven the delegation of human tasks to non-human agents. Yet who in infosec today can prove agents worthy of trust? Unbridled technology advances, as we have repeatedly learned in history, bring very serious risks of accelerated and expanded humanitarian disasters. The infosec industry has been slow to address social inequalities and conflict that escalates on the technical platforms under their watch; we must stop those who would ply vulnerabilities in big data systems, those who strive for quick political (arguably non-humanitarian) power wins. It is in this context that algorithm security increasingly becomes synonymous with security professionals working to avert, or as necessary helping win, kinetic conflicts instigated by digital exploits. This presentation therefore takes the audience through technical details of defensive concepts in algorithmic warfare based on an illuminating history of international relations. It aims to show how and why to seed security now into big data technology rather than wait to unpoison its fruit.
