Screenshot: A Weblog

This is a robotics application I've never run into before, but it is actually being used in the Netherlands: a gas pumping robot. The video shown makes it look like it works pretty well too, and while it seems slow the article says it speeds things up enough to actually increase their number of sales per pump. I do wonder how much of that is the fact that, to use the pump, you preregister with your credit card number and preferred type of gas (so that you don't interact with the robot at all, you just pull up and sit while the robot does its thing). The RFiD tag alone would eliminate the time I spend fumbling around with my credit card and receipt and getting everything in and out of my wallet. It may be that the advantage of having the robot fill your tank is just enough to get people to take advantage of the RFiD technology.

Posted by Amanda at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The news from earlier in the week that Google is committing to providing users easy and free ways to move their data in and out of Google products addresses one of the concerns I have had about cloud computing. I understand the appeal in terms of expense, and I have had good experiences when I have used Google Docs for collaboration. But often the content being created is stuff that I may want around many years in the future, or also available off-line on a flash drive (we can pretend the entire world is networked, but in just the past two months I can think of three different trips that left me in locations with no convenient network connectivity).

We are even running into this with the course management systems we are looking at - not all of them offer the same degree of data portability. It seems that part of the issue there is a lack of clear "neutral" format to export all courses too, which certainly makes sense given the diversity of the tools available. But there are also systems where you can access old courses in perpetuity on their servers but cannot export the course to your own computer - where in perpetuity I fear means only for the lifetime of your school's contract with the provider. This type of lock-in makes me very nervous.

Posted by Amanda at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We've been talking about various types of scheduling problems in my AI class, so this local article about computer modeling used to schedule sports games caught my eye. It is an interesting constraint problem - not just the number of games, mix of who plays who, and frequency of games, but particular rules based on amount of time needed to set aside for travel and other issues of fairness. It is particularly worthwhile to think about the advantages this system offers when changes occur that make a planned upon schedule no longer acceptable. Often, the human response to that is to try to find the solution that requires the fewest shifts possible, in part because it avoids "messing up" large parts of the already-difficult-to-construct schedule. With this type of software in place, it becomes debatable whether the fix with the fewest changes is optimal compared to the fix that results in a new global optimization. This is probably a place where knowing a bit more about sports would help me.

Posted by Amanda at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)