Forget flying cars and get ready for air taxis

Airbus

Flying cars are dumb.

Yes, the cars in Blade Runner, The 5th Element and Back to the Future are cool, and who wouldn't want to push a button and take to the sky in their Honda Civic? But it's not going to happen any time in the next few decades, if ever. Frankly, the average driver can't be trusted with anything that breaks free of the earth. Plus, adding potentially millions of vehicles to the sky is a logistical nightmare that's sure to end in more than a few collisions that, unlike earth-based vehicles, would end with potentially hundreds of injured or killed bystanders. But that doesn't mean the only time we'll take to the skies for transit will be via international airports.
Instead of flying cars, get ready for fleets of small "air taxis" zipping from hub to hub within a region, delivering passengers to their destinations. There's a reason Uber is so bullish on this idea -- it's an outstanding complement to its current business model. The company wants a world where you take an Uber to one of its flight hubs, hop into a eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) craft and be whisked to another hub on the other side of town. You'd then finish the trip in, you guessed it, an Uber.
It's also not too hard to imagine current airlines wanting in on the action too; most already offer commuter flights. Plus, of course, there's going to be an onslaught of random startups hoping to be the "Uber of the sky."
But Uber's dream requires partners, new regulations, a change to air traffic control and an infrastructure that doesn't exist today. Plus, you need actual flying vehicles, whatever they might look like.
Fortunately, there's commercial interest in building these air taxis of the future. Airbus' A3 and Aurora Flight Sciences (an Uber partner that happens to work with the DoD) are both working on eVTOL craft. Neither aircraft being developed by these companies resembles a car. Instead they look like futuristic tiny planes. Both take off like a helicopter but fly like a plane, which makes them perfect for short (under 50 to 60 miles) jaunts for two people. But as these get closer to full production (both companies are targeting 2020 for full-size test vehicles), it's clear that one of those seats will be filled by a pilot.
"Pilot" is probably not what the person behind the wheel (or maybe joystick) will be called. Maybe a controller is the better description. Flying one these multi-rotor craft would be impossible without a computer stabilizing the flight with tiny adjustments being made to each motor at all times. A typical helicopter has two rotors that have to be adjusted constantly by the pilot. Adding six more to that mix and a human wouldn't be able to keep control. "It's obviously impossible to fly this plane fully manually. This plane has to be a fly-by-wire system out of the out of the box." said Diana Siegel, eVTOL program manager at Aurora.

Full autonomy may come eventually, but like self-driving cars, a lot of work needs to be done. Ken Goodrich, research engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center, believes it might be 20 years before we see a pilot-less aircraft zipping around an urban area. "You'll certainly find people that say, 'oh no, you know that will happen in five years 10 years.' You know, truthfully nobody knows. But we probably will have to take an evolutionary process to get there, just like it's taking place with driver-less cars today."

Autonomy won't stop in the air though. Air traffic control is going have to evolve to handle all these extra craft. According to Goodrich, at certain times there are as many air traffic controllers on the ground as there are planes in the air. That model would be unsustainable if a city were to add multiple hubs and potentially hundreds of air taxis.

"The individual's ability to manage airplanes quickly becomes an issue. If you try to scale that up, not only is it individuals that run into bottlenecks but just hand offs between individuals is also a bottleneck. It has to become much more automated," Goodrich told Engadget.

The FAA, for its part, has been talking to manufacturers and is "taking a flexible, risk-based approach to integrating innovative new technologies" said Ian Gregor, FAA public affairs manager. Gregor also noted that the agency is looking at the AI-controlled future, "Several areas need further research, particularly identifying the operational risks, making sure the automation that 'flies' the autonomous vehicle is safe, and how the automation will interact with the air traffic control system."

Zach Lovering, project executive of A3's Vahana eVTOL, seems enthusiastic about the agency's course, "While it's true that historically the FAA has been slow to adopt new technologies, recent work being performed across many divisions of the FAA marks a significant shift in their approach. Not only is the FAA working to modernize the small aircraft certification process, but they are also working to integrate unmanned vehicles into our airspace."

But even if the air taxis can fly and the FAA is ready to add them to US airspace there's still one big hurdle that technology might not be able to tackle: The people living near the hubs.

The biggest issue will be sound. There's a reason houses near the airport are cheaper. That said, the creators of these aircraft insist that they won't be any louder than nearby roads. "Our design goal is really to be able to take off and blend in with road traffic that are 70-75 decibels," said Siegel. That's possible thanks to the electric motors that'll be powering the rotors on the craft.

After the initial vertical take, the craft will fly forward like a plane and be even quieter. But potential neighbors will probably want to see a demonstration before they're cool with a tiny airport in their hood.

Additionally, who will be the first customers? Taking a new type of car across town is one thing, flying in a new type of craft might take a while to catch on. Plus, there's a good chance that it's going to be way pricier than driving. In addition to the aircraft, you need a hub with landing spots, chargers, buildings and staff to act as local traffic control, customer service and maintenance. So initially it'll be confined to executives, Fyre Festival trust fund kids and lottery winners.

But eventually, the rest of us would be able to ride across the town when we're in a huge hurry. Although for some, their first trip will likely be because of an emergency. These eVTOLs would make great ambulances in a congested urban area. However they're used and how soon the rest of us will be able to fly in one without a pilot is just a matter of getting full-size craft in the air which should happen in the next three to five years. Maybe sooner.

I'm sorry, you're not getting a flying car, but if your grandchildren are lucky they might get something that flies to get them around town. "We think it's kind of funny when people call us a flying car — if Vahana is a flying car then so is a helicopter!" Lovering told Engadget. Siegel concurs, "If we can get away from [the phrase] 'flying car' that would be wonderful."

So let's keep the cars on the ground. Because the sky belongs to something else.

Welcome to Tomorrow, Engadget's new home for stuff that hasn't happened yet. You can read more about the future of, well, everything, at Tomorrow's permanent home and check out all of our launch week stories here.

In this article: a3, airbus, airtaxi, airtrafficcontrol, applenews, aurora, design, flyingcars, gadgetry, gadgets, gear, green, NASA, tomorrow, transportation, Vahana

By Roberto Baldwin @strngwys

When not reporting about technology and cats, Roberto spends his time surfing, snowboarding, playing in too many bands and trying to figure out where he left his MagSafe 2 adaptor. 

How Marcel Proust Is Going Digital

The University of Illinois commemorates the centennial of the First World War by digitizing the work of Marcel Proust.

By William Fenton

Hours before Germany formally declared war on France in WWI, Marcel Proust penned a letter to his financial advisor that anticipated the horrors to come. He wrote:

“In the terrible days we are going through, you have other things to do besides writing letters and bothering with my petty interests, which I assure you seem wholly unimportant when I think that millions of men are going to be massacred in a War of the Worlds comparable with that of [H. G.] Wells, because the Emperor of Austria thinks it advantageous to have an outlet onto the Black Sea.”

This letter, composed the night of August 2, 1914 and digitized in the online exhibition Proust and the Great War, offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of France’s preeminent writers on the eve of war to end all wars. As part of a cross-campus initiative at the University of Illinois, this exhibition puts project-based learning into practice: a semester-long effort by François Proulx, assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his graduate students to curate, digitize, contextualize, and translate Proust war correspondence.

The exhibition provides a glimpse at a longer, ongoing digitization effort at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thanks to a partnership with the French Cultural Services and Centenary Commission, faculty, staff, and students will make hundreds of rare letters written between 1914 and 1919 publicly available next fall in Marcel Proust’s World War I Letters: A Digital Edition. While this project will be a boon to Proust scholars and World War I historians, its stakes should interest a range of online learning practitioners and enthusiasts.

How can literature help us to commemorate, recollect, and reevaluate war? What should a scholarly edition look like in the 21st century? And how might that digital version exceed its print counterpart?

WWI Today

World War I often takes a backseat to World War II in American historical memory. This raises obstacles for those seeking to commemorate the centennial of U.S. entry into the war (April 6, 1917). Bénédicte de Montlaur, cultural counselor of the French Embassy, acknowledged that challenge during our conversation about the Proust digitization effort.

“The First World War is not present in the public memory here as it is in France, but that’s why we think it’s important to focus on how this war shaped international affairs,” she explained. “It marks the beginning of the United Nations, and it’s when America became a superpower.”

The French Embassy has planned a host of events to commemorate the centennial, including concerts, conferences, film screenings, and, of course, the sponsorship of Marcel Proust’s World War I Letters: A Digital Edition.

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which possesses one of the largest collections of Proust manuscripts, is a natural partner for the French Embassy as it seeks to reinforce ties between French scholars, intellectuals, artists and their American counterparts. (Montlaur noted that the embassy is also collaborating with Columbia University, Duke University, NYU, Texas A&M University, and UCLA on other centennial commemoration projects.)

“Proust is the French author everyone refers to. He’s our Shakespeare. He’s our Goethe,” explained Montlaur.

Commemorating World War I using Proust correspondence doesn’t just serve the interests of Proust scholars; it also mobilizes their interest to draw new attention to the war. Proust’s letters lend texture to the experience of war, and challenge mechanized associations with flashes of doubt, despair, and reverence.

In a March 1915 letter, Proust recollects: “I went outside, under a lucid, dazzling, reproachful, serene, ironic, maternal moonlight, and in seeing this immense Paris that I did not know I loved so much, waiting, in its useless beauty, for the onslaught that could no longer be stopped, I could not keep myself from weeping.”

In letter from that summer, he laments: “We are told that War will beget Poetry, and I don’t really believe it. Whatever poetry had appeared so far was far unequal to Reality.” (I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Proulx’s graduate students, Nick Strole and Peter Tarjanyi, curated and translated these letters.)

Proust’s letters remind us of the human costs of warfare and articulate doubt that we rarely permit preeminent authors. A digital edition of that correspondence could help de-monumentalize Proust, making him more accessible to scholars, educators, and learners.

The Kolb Edition

To appreciate the digital edition to come, one must understand how Proust was studied before. The de facto edition of Proust is a 21-volume edition of letter edited by Philip Kolb, a professor of French at the University of Illinois. Published between 1970 and 1993 — shortly after Kolb’s death — this edition represents his life’s work.

The Kolb edition is remarkable in its scope and ambition. In addition to collecting all of the letters available at the time of publication (more than 5,300), he also seeks to place them into chronological order. This is no small feat given that Proust didn’t date letters. (There was no need because letter writing was a daily activity and the envelopes included postage marks.) Kolb spent most of his professional life performing inferential detective work. For example, if Proust mentioned foggy weather in a letter, Kolb would find the weather report from the month in order to infer or at least narrow the date. He recorded all of this contextual material, what we would call metadata, on index cards — more than 40,000 in total.

As Caroline Szylowicz, the Kolb-Proust librarian, curator of rare books and manuscripts and associate professor at the University of Illinois, explained it, Kolb effectively created a paper-based relational database. He created files for every person mentioned in correspondence, file identifiers for each letter, and even a complete chronology of Proust’s social life.

In the 25 years since the publication of the last volume, more than 600 letters have surfaced in auction catalogues, specialized journals, and books. (The collections at the University of Illinois have increased from 1,100 at the time of Kolb’s death to more than 1,200 today.) Those letters are valuable in their own right, but they also change the way scholars understand the existing corpus. For example, a new letter might include information that revises previous chronology.

It’s no longer feasible to produce an updated Kolb edition. For a number of institutional reasons, faculty are no longer encouraged to produce vast scholarly editions, no less work that requires decades to produce. Publishers aren’t eager to print multi-volume editions for a limited audience.

“With the steady appearance of rediscovered or newly available letters, a new print edition would be out of date within a few decades,” explained Proulx. “Also, a 20-volume edition would be prohibitively expensive for individual readers, and mostly only available in research libraries.”

A digital edition, on the other hand, doesn’t need a publisher, and it can expand to accommodate new letters and context as it becomes available. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library began the digitization process immediately after Kolb’s death: Szylowicz, in particular, marked up (using TEI) Kolb’s research notes and documentation to make them electronically available via the Kolb-Proust Archive. Marcel Proust’s World War I Letters willextend that work by digitizing hundreds of his actual letters.

Toward a Digital Edition

While the Proust Digital Edition won’t be available until next fall — sometime before the end of the centennial on November 11, 2018 — readers can expect that it will look something like the Proust and the Great Waronline exhibition that I cited at the beginning of this piece.

Unlike the Kolb edition, which was published entirely in French, the digital edition will accommodate transcriptions and English translations, which Proulx and Szylowicz will solicit through an open-source crowdsourcing platform developed by their partners at the Université Grenoble Alpes. Whereas scholars used to format the exact text to show a finished state (what’s called a linear transcription), today many scholars seek to reveal the process of writing by including marginalia and emendations (diplomatic transcription). The crowdsourcing platform will accommodate both forms of transcription simultaneously, allowing readers to see the unfinished aspects of Proust’s writing. This technical choice may enable scholars to read his work differently: Proust often added or clarified his remarks in postscript that might not otherwise be visible in a linear transcription.

The digital edition will also allow readers to see Proust’s hand through scans of letters. In addition to conveying a sense the aura of a letter (as a material object), a digital copy allows a reader to attend to the conditions of his writing. “Proust’s letters are often somewhat messy,” explained Proulx. “His handwriting is frequently difficult to read, he sometimes scribbles in the margins or even between lines. Images, when they are available, give a better sense of the letter as its recipient would have experienced it: an often-hurried missive from a complicated man.”

“Proust’s penmanship evolves over time, from childhood letters, to his ‘dandy’ years, when he consciously starts to develop a distinctive hand, with curious c’s that extend under the following letters,” added Szylowicz. “In the last weeks of his life, Proust, who is then weakened by asthma and pneumonia, is unable to speak and reduced to writing little notes to [his caretaker] on scraps of paper or the back of letters, in a distinctly shaking hand.” (Reference an example here.)

The availability of images and different transcription practices provide new ways of experiencing Proust that undermine the notion of a monumental author, but also reveal, in the words of Proulx, a complicated man. Authors must be granted moments of frailty: to deny them that is to deny them humanity and to practice hagiography.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a digital edition invites new participants into textual editing. That is, while Kolb’s edition has served scholars well, the complexity of a digital edition demands new forms of expertise and participation: that of curators, researchers, and scholars, certainly, but also that of technologists, transcribers, translators, and students. Enlisting students in the editing process isn’t just a useful pedagogical exercise; it will likely produce new discoveries, as Proulx and his students demonstrate with their online exhibition.

Read more: “The Met Makes Public-Domain Artifacts Free to Use”

Silver Pack

Pratik Patel , AFF (India) Top Author Forum Guru 1/2/2013 12:51 pm

Affiliate since: 04/04/2012, Power Rank: 99999999 | Read Pratik's 40 other Ask SC answers

Very nice question for recent Event of SFI in New year for Investment planning.

Well let me give you some brief of Silver in present and also of future.
Silver's easy availability, diversified use places it high in the list of industrial and investor preference. Silver is a precious metal and an industrial metal, and both sectors are dynamic and volatile in nature. Silver is a precious metal just like gold. But as compared to gold, silver has far more industrial applications that includes in bearings, welding, conducting electricity, photography, brazing, soldering, washing machines, jewelry and others. As the global economy emerges from its recession, demand for silver is going to skyrocket three times more fast than gold. Silver is in high demand in industrial economies as well as emerging economies.

We have these much awesome reasons to invest in this s76 product. i would like to make it as standing order if it's available so by doing this i can do monthly investment for which i am sure i will get higher RIO in future. We are not able to purchase it weekly or daily but saving of whole month can let us to buy it for our bright future. Even there is auctions of it also coming then its very nice way to win it in cheap price than purchasing directly. Auctions of it are combined with 75TC also which can help you in future winning of same . So as per my point of view winning it in auction will be at higher degree for investment planning.

6 simple, easy ways to add Co-Sponsored Affiliates to your downline!

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06/07/2016

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My Experience

Manohar Mattu, STL (India) Top Author Forum Guru 11/12/2015 5:25 am

Affiliate since: 12/18/2011, Power Rank: 25 | Read Manohar 's 240 other Ask SC answers

Dear Norman

As per my experience, one generally experiences a loss (small or bigger) in the first year. 

Because one is trying to build one’s team of active members by recruiting, sponsoring, purchasing or through ‘Bid & Build’. There is definitely a certain amount of financial loss, and moreover, you are in the process of in and outs of your SFI Business. But one should not quit if he had read the Launch Pad Lesson 11 properly and thoroughly that gives the example of great Internet Gurus and MLM marketers. 


The main reason is that only 3% or less members get activated and they also need the same understanding that they will be bearing loses in their first year. How difficult it becomes to tell someone that he will be in loss for the first year, but still he should not think of quitting, as your success depends directly on their success. 


In my opinion, unless, you keep them motivated by giving TCredits, Cash Certificates etc. they are going to run away leaving you in a ditch. You need to further bear some more loses to keep them moving, till they become BTLs or more. Then you can leave them off their own. 


So, your real income starts coming in the third year and within 6 months you almost break even. Then here onwards once your team also become self-reliant, you can think of making some good money as Direct Commission and commissions from your CSAs. By now you should have more than 200 active and somewhat active PSAs and around 800-1000 CSAs. 


So, safely we can come to a conclusion that in the fourth year there is no looking back and you can be a silver, gold or platinum member as per your funds available to you.


Hope it helps!
Have a wonderful day!!

How much time should I allow before I should expect to be producing income from SFI?

How much time should I allow before I should expect to be producing income from SFI?

Teresa Schultz (South Africa)
Affiliate since 5/1/2015 Power Rank: 1655 | Read Teresa's 85 other Ask SC answers

Allowing something means letting it happen. You are the one in control of what you allow or don't allow.


Your question makes me want to ask questions of my own:


What were your thoughts ahead of this question? What is your plan if you don't make a specific amount of money in a specific time period? Would you think of quitting SFI if you don't make that amount in that time? Would you extend your original estimated time period and continue working towards a specific income amount that you have in mind?

Next, what sort of income amount are you thinking of or asking about?


Are you asking how long it took for others who were already happy with the income they're receiving from SFI? How long it took somebody else depends on the time they had available to work, what they did, and, sometimes, also how much money they invested, on luck in winning things to help them with their SFI business, and on the specific amount they wanted to earn at the end of it all.


You need a plan. How much time you have available each month to work at SFI; what amount you'd like to earn monthly, a list of the things you can do and how much income each action might generate for you, amounts of money you may want to spend to help you, and how long it will take to do all these things. Add up the income each action might generate for you, as well as the hours or days or week or months of the time needing to spent on different things you'll be doing, and then you will have answered your own question.


You are the best person to answer this question. Only you know the answers to some of the things that will contribute towards determining how long it will take you to achieve what you want to.