Friday, April 6, 2012

Homework 8


I read “Coming to your bicycle: wireless braking?” it was published on March 26th 2012 and is from CNN.  This article was very interesting to me.  The idea is putting sensors on the handle bars that automatically triggers the brakes.  A bicycle is one of the things that I thought would remain the same forever besides changes in design and things like that.  I never thought bikes would have sensors in them that automatically triggers brakes.  It makes sense to test this idea with bikes because it is much cheaper as well as safer to crash brakes than other things.  They claim that tis invention works with greater than ninety nine percentage.  However, they say it is far from ready and will take at least another five years before it will be out for purchase because it takes a while for them to figure out if it is going to work commercially.  Holger Hermans is the name of the inventor.  To him bikes are just a stepping stone to what this invention could potentially achieve.  He eventually hopes to have his brake sensors working with cars and even trains.  He claims the difficulty with applying this to trains is it could cause some trains to release their emergency brake and come to a complete stop and it takes a while to get trains moving again after this.  I am interested to see if we will be using this technology soon.  I think it will really help things like trains to operate more efficiently.  Wireless technology is becoming a huge trend and is making technology with wires obsolete.  I think pretty much everything that can be wireless will be in the next ten years or so.  As we discussed in class there are several things we use every day that are wireless and we don’t even realize it.  Technology has come a long way and it seems it will continue to do so.  New inventions and ideas are coming out every day and will continue to change the way we live.           

2 comments:

  1. I found this article interesting because I personally would have never thought of incorporating a sensor type brake for a bycicle, I just never really thought it would be possible. I think it makes a great deal of sense because in today's world there are so many forms of accidents and with people not paying attention to the road and whats going on around them it's imperitivie that we have a form of a back up saftey option to help prevent accidents from occuring. As far as the brakes being installed in automobiles and trains I think that it would also be beneficial as long as they work properly and are used to ensure people's saftey.

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  2. I found this article to be very interesting. I thought the same way that you did about how bikes would be the same forever besides changing the design and things like that. I never even thought of putting sensors on the handle bars to trigger the brakes. I think if it is done correctly that it will be very helpful and beneficial to everyone. If they figure out how to also do it with cars and trains I think that it could definitely prevent a lot of accidents from occurring. I agree with you on how wireless technology is becoming a huge trend now. I also think that in the future almost everything will be wireless because they are always finding out new things with technology as each day passes. Technology has definitely changed the way we live and is making things a lot easier for us with all the new things that are coming out now.

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