A swarm of submarine drones will scour the depths for MH370
economist.com
economist.com
Seems up to the job, and while 8 may not be a swarm of bees, I think for deep sea subs it works as a term.
If so a cluster.
Drones are males - they don't actually do any work, living exclusively to have sex with a queen in spring. Once mating season is over, they are evicted from the hive to die - they are unable to fend for themselves. I believe it'd be rare to find drones as part of a swarm of bees in the normal case of a swarm.
Worker bees are females. I've never heard them called anything other than a worker bee.
Airborne association with drones is quite a recent thing with rise of "military drones" (mostly recon) and subsequently manufacturers of RC multirotors using a word distancing their products from RC toys. RC multirotors are drones only in the sense that they maintain altitude and orientation autonomously.
Working in this field, I can say that applying common terminology is not as superficial an act as it may seem. There are similarities in the rulesets governing the dynamics of animal collectives irrespective of the working environment, so usong common terms accross disciplines of study helps avoid confusion and also helps identify points of leverage. For example, engineers building biomimetic swarms of seagliders may benefit from studying V-formations of geese, even though you don't often see sealife swimming in a V-formation.
A swarm requires more than one entity whose behavior is directly affected by the behavior of another entity. One of the most fascinating interdisciplinary aspects of swarms, IMO, is the fact that all swarms can be described by Radial Distribution Functions (2), which is also how states of matter can be characterized - in terms of density and lattice structure (and even polarity in extended versions). More amazingly is that, similar to the way matter in different states yields different physical behavior (e.g. between gas, liquid, solid), it's looking more and more like swarms do the same. They may even have predictable state transition points.
1.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behaviour (See bilogical swarming) 2.) The use of radial distribution and pair‐correlation functions to analyze and describe biological aggregations: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
https://www.km.kongsberg.com/ks/web/nokbg0240.nsf/AllWeb/B3F...
That's an interesting point of view. I guess it's common with really expensive things?
The shared traits among motorcycles and an AUV include a more adventurous risk profile, affinity for mechanical devices, and less ubiquitous uptake than alternative forms of transportation.
I have one and I've personally gotten more than five friends to buy. So far the feedback has been positive. I know nothing about the company and receive zero commission or guidance.
> This means access to support 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The HUGIN family also provides upgrades, advice, training and participation in our AUV user conference where ideas and experience are shared.
So they do mean something concrete by it, even if the language is flowery and over-affectionate.
And they're a defence contractor. It's sort of like a much smaller Norwegian domestic version of Lockheed Martin or Boeing.
Have things changed this much since 2014? What would happen if the exact same scenario happened again (airliner switches off all transponders and veers off course into an ocean) in 2018?
That wouldn't help intentionally or accidentally disabled transceivers as was (probably) the case for MH370. That would require space based radar... which was once but is no longer a DoD project. It'll happen eventually.
They could publish the data and crowdsource the review process. Also perhaps some machine learning techniques could be applied to indentify most interesting segments to review.
Do you have any sources for that? Everything I've read has suggested it as possible but never going stronger than probable
For example, consider another flight that disappeared mysteriously over the ocean: Air France 447.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
It took nearly 2 years to find and recover the flight recorders. Once they were analyzed, the results were shocking: the pilots flew a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean after a relatively minor technical fault. It had a major impact on pilot training and procedures across the globe.
That's why they'll keep searching for MH370. Beyond closure for the families, there's a chance that there was something in that crash that we all need to know.
MH370 is orders of magnitude harder to find, and AF447 was a huge effort.
ARCGIS had a fairly detailed visualization of the search and the data. At the bottom of the page, there are some examples of other things that were found: https://geoscience-au.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.htm...
(HN comments for the latter link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14802105)
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/03/asia/blaine-gibson-mh370/index...
[2] French TV documentary about this complaint: https://youtu.be/ir-PBqynwII
Bonus: Just found that: http://www.thehuntformh370.info/
I am Dutch, we had our MH17. I just checked, apparently MAS17/370 is correct as well.
Good catch. I think MH370 was more commonly used, so I've edited the title.
They could come up to the surface to recharge their solar batteries or maybe charge them using turbines rotated by the water movements.
They could remotely relay images and data to a publicly accessible services where they could be crowdsourced for interesting findings.
I think something like this could be useful for more than just the search for MH370 (oceanography, marine biology, etc.)
- Submarines aren't great because solar is your best source for power, and you don't want to divide each day to "work" and "rest" because you need to recharge on the surface.
- Electric propulsion will also require some rather substantial solar setup.
For these reasons, I think either "passive" sensors just following the currents, or sailing vessels, are better candidates at first.
There's also the "glider" concept, where you fill/empty a ballast tank and achieve forward momentum by changing depth while having an aerodynamically-shaped hull. I'm wondering if these could also drag a turbine for electric power, but I fear that idea is coming dangerously close to breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
- Satellite internet is, unfortunately, too expensive for anything beyond short status codes / coordinates / commands. It's something like 10 cents for every 80bytes. You'd need to navigate to coastal waters and pick up cellular/wifi signals to transmit the payloads.
That's pretty bold.
That sentence seemed gushing and overstated. Presumably a large metal plane isn't really going anywhere and if these 8 underwater drones don't find it then if people keep trying they will in the future.
Mostly, they highlighted instances of authorities either correcting previous mistakes, or withholding information slightly longer than necessary.
Yet it's quite obvious how these two errors are related: If you're eagerly accused of the former, you'll tend to indulge in the latter.
It's also important to consider that the Indonesian authorities were simply overburdened by such an investigation, were likely to make all sorts of mistakes under stress, and had to content with competing interests that were impossible to satisfy.
Then, this investigation happened to involve dozens of authorities and companies from different countries, making errors in communications, distrust, and cultural clashes much more likely than, say, a US-made aircraft crashing in Colorado.
The debris that was discovered in Australia and Africa seems to, roughly, validate the initial search efforts. While there may be competing theories pointing to slightly different areas of the Indian Ocean to be searched, there's nothing supporting the "real" conspiracy theories that the plane was diverted to Riad and will be used to start WW III.
By contradictions I meant the stuff like this [1]. Malaysia got slammed internationally by governments all over the world for their misleading and contradictory statements. It was hard for everyone to explain the particulars away as the being overburdened and stressed. If it had been, I imagine other governments would have been more understanding of that and not slammed them so hard.
One particular incident that left me flabbergasted -- but which perhaps could be explained (though not excused) by miscommunication -- was this one, where I seem to recall (though I can't find the exact article) that they confirmed the flaperon found belonged to the plane before even the French -- who were the ones doing the analysis -- came to such a conclusion [2]:
> On Wednesday, Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister, said the flaperon that washed up on the French territory in the Indian Ocean, since transported to France for analysis, was from the doomed flight. But his assertion has not been backed up by the other authorities involved in the investigation, and the dissonant stances have infuriated many relatives of those on board the plane, who have waited more than 500 days for concrete clues into the fates of their loved ones.
> Transport minister Liow Tiong Lai says more possible MH370 debris has been sent to France for analysis. “Why the hell do you have one confirm and one not?” Sara Weeks, the sister of New Zealander Paul Weeks, who was on board, told Associated Press. “Why not wait and get everybody on the same page so the families don’t need to go through this turmoil?”
> The claims and counter-claims continued on Thursday when Liow said a team on the French territory of Réunion had collected more apparent plane debris. The claim was contradicted by French officials, who said no new material in the search for MH370 had been turned over to French authorities.
How in the world they could jump to conclusions before the people actually doing the investigations certainly beats me. I could see it as being a miscommunication, but this was not a one-off incident, and that got harder and harder for the international community swallow the more times it occurred. I recall getting pretty convinced that they were covering up something, though I couldn't go farther and speculate on what exactly that might have been. (When I heard about the misdetected pings I thought perhaps they should have been looking into the Asia possibility too, but only because they had already poured so much effort into other dead end that this seemed worth a shot, not because it seemed otherwise particularly plausible. I dismissed that idea pretty quickly after they found parts from the plane.)
[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/china-slams-malaysi...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/06/mh370-search-p...
It is probably just human nature. Many people will continue to think and do what they did before, even after having the error of their ways explained to them. While you might expect a person in a position of responsibility to act more responsibly, it also seems possible that such a person might consider himself to be more competent than average, which would exacerbate the Dunning-Kruger effect - in this case, thinking his hunch about the debris is as good as a conclusion by crash investigators.
A false report of more debris being found might be a misunderstanding of the original find being reported through different channels at different times. An impulsive person, eager to say something, might not consider that possibility before making an announcement.
maybe that one will be next i hope.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2967157/Vladimir-Put...
It'll be interesting to see what what comes of this effort.
My gut feeling is that some people in power do not want this plane found.
I did too, until I looked out the window on my first daytime flight over the sea. A seemingly endless stretch of unbroken blue. It was probably the next best thing to being in space and made me appreciate just how much water there is!
And that's just the surface.