Google Maps Lawsuit: Woman Follows Directions, Gets Run Over
mashable.com
mashable.com
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/361483/screenshots/streetview_29994....
Upvoted just for the irony.
Come on, that's going too far.
> Northcutt's Darwin Awards site gives "Honorable Mentions" to people who survive their misadventures with their reproductive capacity intact, by luck or chance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Awards#Examples
(Except her injury was unremarkable, even with the pedestrian walkway nearby.)
It's going to cripple us as a society at some point.
I was on the shoulder of the road, but I have ridden on highways (not freeways) without a shoulder, on a road bike, before. When I did, I often picked my bike up and stood on the dirt beside the road and waited for a wave of vehicles to pass. I've employed similar tactics while walking along highways. She may not have.
I don't think walking where she walked was necessarily stupid. I think she may have just been unlucky. Or maybe she wasn't far enough on the shoulder of the highway. I also think the lawsuit is frivolous, because it hinges on the idea that she did something really stupid with Google's help.
Your Own Safety: Not Your Responsibility
I'm a little suprised on this site, of all sites, to see people subscribing to the idea that we are constrained by the intelligence of our parents.
EDIT: Spelling
If the answer to the first question is "yes", it shouldn't take much to extrapolate from there.
Now, how to divvy up that quality which we call intelligence into what is inherited and what is learned is an open, and difficult, question. I think it's pretty clear that both are important, and their relative weights probably vary from individual to individual. Still, is the idea that intelligence comes in part from our DNA "remotely suggested"? I think it's fair to say so.
To rephrase my question: are you smarter than most (and in all likelihood all) non-human animals?
The answer is yes, and in the case of humans vs animals, I deny that it's because of culture or upbringing or all the other stuff that gets lumped into the category of "nurture". If it were just that, well, my cats would by now be speaking about as well as human five year olds do.
It's clear to me that nature plays a role. How much of a role is unclear, and, as I said, I suspect it varies.
For historical reasons, we're stuck with both racist pseudoscience and politically correct pseudoscience to contend with. I bet the truth about these matters, if ever found, will be somewhere in between. (And, FWIW, closer to the politically correct side of things.)
It is defiantly learned behavior how you want to make use of the capability but as plenty of people with learning difficulties would attest, if the underlying function isn't as strong as in others it makes it a whole lot harder to learn even with the motivation.
Given that, the only negative influence such people have by breeding is the influence they wield over their children (which can be a lot, but can also be overcome).
This paper says IQ has 70% heritability, based on a twin adoption study. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2218526
Other twin studies have found 75-90% heritability for attention deficit disorder.
Schizophrenia is moderately heritable.
Migraine is well-known for running in families.
If a pedestrian is keeping as close to the side of the road as reasonably possible and is reasonably visible (e.g. not wearing all black on a pitch black section of road), then it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a driver to avoid crashing into them - even on a highway. Especially if it's a reasonably straight road which most highways are.
I'll just leave this here.
But then I reread the parent's post and now I think what they meant is that a nice feature would be one that displayed a route's level of safety. For example, if the route makes you cross a busy highway it might get a red label while a route that crosses no roads would get a green label.
It would be a nice feature but it might open them to actual liability for reporting inaccurate safety information.
Who was it that said there would be no car accidents if we replaced airbags with spikes?
Imagine what would happen if someone walking a "safe" route gets mugged.
Even lawyers realize the system is broken.
Google used it to get Brian Reid's age-discrimination case thrown out. He appealed that decision and won so now he gets to go to trial.
This will doubtless come back to haunt her in the future.
people need to understand that they're dealing with dumb mapping engines, not some all-seeing oracle.
if a situation is dangerous, you need to go back the way you came and get better information. if you plunge forward anyway, you do it at your own risk, just as you would be if you got directions from a human.
if your mama didn't teach you to walk on the left side of the road facing the traffic and to look both ways before you cross, it ain't google's fault.
http://geographicjourney.wordpress.com/2010/01/30/google-goe...