While I love going to large events like Giants games or the circus, I hate dealing with the traffic afterward. Finally though, some good has now come out of the frustration of after-event traffic.
Engineering students at Purdue University have come up with a new method to track traffic: Bluetooth. The students tracked Bluetooth signals from cell phones and other devices carried by football fans as they drove home from a recent Penn State game.
The method uses each signal to constantly update how long it takes vehicles and pedestrians to travel from one point to another. Darcy Bullock, professor of civil engineering at Purdue believes that "Harnessing the wireless signals represents a potentially low-cost leap in technology to provide information for everything from the speed of the morning commute to the sluggishness of airport security lines."
Since each Bluetooth signal is unique, each device can be tracked by its travel time using detectors installed at intersections or along highways. In the most recent study, the students used a special antenna to identify 1,520 Bluetooth addresses in the crowd of more than 57,000.
The students then used 13 tracking stations to monitor the Bluetooth signals as fans drove home from the game at Purdue's Ross-Ade Stadium along two routes leading to Interstate 65: a 4.2-mile southern route and a 5.2-mile northern route. They then determined which routes from the stadium had the fastest times.
Graduate student Mary Martchouk said "We found that the postgame travel time along the southern route was up to 28 minutes, but the travel time along the northern route was only 12 to 14 minutes, even though the northern route is one mile longer".
The researchers came to the conclusion that using the Bluetooth was far more effective than alternative methods. Typically traffic trackers employed the use of camcorders and spotters to record individual license plate numbers on cars as a means of tracking.
Seems the Bluetooth method is about 200% less invasive, since license plate tacking identifies the person being tracked.
The students will be hosting a national webinar, scheduled for 12:30 p.m. Dec. 3, that's open to the public.
I've often wondered what a true geek's best pickup line would be, but thought "come on over and build this computer with me!" might be a little far-fetched. As it turns out, not at all.
To help students to get their geek on, Purdue University on Monday announced Rack-A-Node, an online computer game that lets you build... a computer.
But it's not just any computer, it's a supercomputer. In the game, players are asked to build a cluster supercomputer using a variety of computing types to run science experiments. A player begins with a small supercomputer and receives science jobs to process. If these jobs are successful, the player receives funding needed to build an even bigger supercomputer.
(Credit:
Purdue University)
For example, the game begins with a chemistry job that requires a lot of memory, then a climate-modeling job, which is a high throughput task that needs faster network communication. Later, a 3D science animation-rendering job requires multiple nodes to process. The game also includes jobs from life sciences, pharmacy, physics, and engineering.
The game requires players to optimize the supercomputer for the type of science job being performed, as certain tools perform better against certain challenges.
According to the school's IT manager, Kyle Bowen, some aspects of Rack-A-Node can be compared with the game "rock, paper, scissors," which seems to be many geeks' favorite in real life.
"The characters on the television show Big Bang Theory would spend hours playing Rack-A-Node," Bowen said.
If you are one of those characters, or just want to test out your geek level, the game is available online for free.
Personally, I suspect this is only the first step. The next versions of the game will possibly involve players designing a computer game for the virtual computer they have built.
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