Tag: Common Sense

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The Next Good Idea

Increase Teachers’ Salaries

Talk about a poor investment in our future…  My sister teaches in the NYC Public High Schools.  Coming from a long line of educators, I have forever been shocked at how little teachers are paid in this country.  If salaries are evidence of how our culture values something, it’s clear no one is really concerned about education.  It only makes sense to put our greatest emphasis on education.

The film blog Thompson On Hollywood, hipped me to a new doc that David Eggers and Vanessa Roth are working on that will hopefully wake us up to this situation.  There is also a good related website called theteachersalaryproject.com that points out many things, like half the teachers have to hold down a second job to survive on the starting salary and teachers make 88 cents on the dollar to comparable positions.

Evidently, a lot of this is collected in the book: Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers, that Eggers co-authored.
Categories
The Next Good Idea

How To Stop Traffic Jams

I have never been good at waiting in line.  Put me in a car stuck in traffic, and you will quickly learn why I live in NYC where you can keep your drive time to an absolute minimum.  Traffic is definitely one of the rings in my vision of hell.

I was quite pleased to find out that traffic jams are curable.  Up until now, I had envisioned the only solution to be a giant robotic claw from out of space that would just pick up the problem vehicles and move them to the side of the road or maybe another highway altogether.
This GOOD IDEA came via Clive Thompson, who keeps an interesting blog at: http://www.collisiondetection.net
Awhile back he wrote about traffic jams and their solution, even providing some good video footage of experiments.  They are kid of beautiful.  Clive Thompson writes:
This is fascinating to watch: A team of Japanese researchers have created “shockwave traffic jams” that replicate the dynamics of real-world highways.
For 15 years, researchers have known that traffic jams can emerge out of the blue. All it takes is for one driver to momentarily slow down, at which point the person behind him hits the brakes, forcing the person behind him to hit the brakes even harder, and so on, and so on. One teensy butterfly flaps its wings, and pretty soon the whole damn interstate’s a mess. If you’re in a helicopter, you can watch the “shockwave” of slowed-down cars propagate backwards through traffic like a wave through water. Physicists have long produced eerily accurate computer models that replicate this phenomenon precisely. But because it’s pretty hard to commandeer an entire highway for the purposes of research, no one has ever replicated the phenomenon in a real-world experiment.

Until now! The Japanese team got a cluster of vehicles to drive in a circle. As theNew Scientist reports, here’s what happened:

They asked drivers to cruise steadily at 30 kilometres per hour, and at first the traffic moved freely. But small fluctuations soon appeared in distances between cars, breaking down the free flow, until finally a cluster of several vehicles was forced to stop completely for a moment.

That cluster spread backwards through the traffic like a shockwave. Every time a vehicle at the front of the cluster was able to escape at up to 40 km/h, another vehicle joined the back of the jam.

The shockwave jam travelled backwards through the ring of vehicles at roughly 20 km/h, which is the same as the speed of the shockwave jams observed on roads in real life, says lead researcher Yuki Sugiyama, a physicist in the department of complex systems at Nagoya University.

“Although the emerging jam in our experiment is small, its behaviour is not different from large ones on highways,” he told New Scientist.

Check out the video of the experiment. Towards the end, the shockwave becomes deliciously mobile — you can really see it moving backwards.

This also puts me in mind of William Beatty, the electrical engineer who — while stuck in traffic in 1998 — figured out a way to hack traffic jams and erase them.Basically, when he was stuck in a jam, he’d slow down until he had a really large amount of space between him and the car in front of him. Then he moved forward in at very slow, uniform speed, so that he no longer stopped and started. Sure enough, the wave stopped at him: Everyone behind him began driving at a uniform 35 mph. “By driving at the average speed of the traffic around me, my car had been ‘eating’ the traffic waves,” he wrote. The only problem, of course, is that he himself was stuck traveling at the average speed of the wave in front of him, which — at 35 mph — is pretty pokey.