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As bulldozers and backhoes start digging away at stimulus-funded road construction projects, one researcher is looking for ways to maximize the existing road infrastructure through computers and calculations. Randall Guensler, a professor at Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is currently working on the latest phases of two Georgia-based studies of "managed lane use," in which drivers are encouraged to adopt behaviors that improve traffic flow. Two well-known examples of managed lane use include congestion pricing and fee-for-entry limited access lanes. "Many experts now believe that actively managing lane use can provide greatly improved service without having to construct extra lanes," Guensler said in a statement. "These managed-lane strategies can be implemented for minimal cost, especially when compared to the land and construction cost, the traffic problems and the demolition issues involved in building new roads." Georgia's two pilot programs, Commute Atlanta and The Congestion Pricing Project, are collecting data about whether lane management works and how drivers feel about it. Reducing the number of cars on the road during peak hours adds to highway capacity, as a roadway can handle more vehicles per hour when bottlenecks and jams are reduced or eliminated. According to Guensler, more vehicles per hour can travel through limited-access lanes because they are less traveled and therefore less congested. "From an engineering standpoint, traffic flow is the product of vehicle speed and traffic density – that is, the speed of the vehicles and how closely are they following each other," he said. Commute Atlanta collected data from GPS trackers installed in the cars of 470 Atlanta-area volunteer households. At first, average household travel patterns were collected and analyzed. Households who were able to reduce their monthly totals were given financial incentives. In the next phase, commuters will endure simulated peak-hour congestion pricing in which drivers are charged for travel during peak hours. This phase will also test improved tracking devices that eliminate toll booths by automatically detecting and charging drivers who have entered limited access lanes or traveled during peak hours. If thoughts of tracking devices make you nervous, you may want to participate in the focus groups of The Congestion Pricing Project, separate from Commute Atlanta but also involving Guensler. The project analyzed the opinions of Atlanta-area drivers regarding congestion pricing and limited-access lanes through a series of focus groups. Some of the results were surprising: "Our focus group work revealed interesting points, including the fact that income groups that wouldn’t generally use value priced lanes still liked having them available," Guensler said. "There are times when everyone finds that these lanes are a good economic decision -- such as when you’re late for daycare, and you’re facing dollar-a-minute overtime charges." Guensler was hard at work when Wired contacted him, but he promised to update us on project progress as implementation continues. We'll keep you posted.
IBM is offering its laid off employees in North America a chance to take a job with the company in India, Nigeria, Russia or other countries through Project Match, a media report said. Citing an internal company document CNN said its Project Match will help interested workers whose jobs are on the chopping block to "identify potential opportunities in growth markets and facilitate consideration by hiring managers in those markets." The company also will help with moving costs and provide visa assistance, it says. Other countries with IBM opportunities include Argentina, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Turkey and United Arab Emirates, according to the document. Only "satisfactory performers" who are "willing to work on local terms and conditions" should pursue the jobs, the document says. CNN said IBM would not immediately confirm if it means that the workers would be paid local wages and would be subject to local labour laws. A spokesman for Alliance at IBM, a workers' group that is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America but does not have official union status at IBM, slammed the initiative. "IBM not only is offshoring its work to low-cost countries, now IBM wants employees to offshore themselves," spokesman Lee Conrad told CNN. "At a time of rising unemployment IBM should be looking to keep both the work and the workers in the United States." New York based IBM has confirmed recent layoffs but has not provided any specifics on the number of people affected. Conrad said IBM has laid off more than 4,000 workers in the US since the beginning of the year, but called that "a conservative number." "This is unacceptable to the Alliance and we are pursuing this by asking our members and all IBM employees to contact their political representatives to demand an accounting and transparency in job cuts and offshoring from IBM," Conrad said.
YouTube first introduced annotations last June, but starting today, Google's popular video sharing site is making it even easier to add text comments into your own videos. Whereas before you had to go into a relatively complicated annotations editor to add your comments, you can now just click on a spot in the video during playback and the annotations editor will open automatically. 
Google has also made it significantly easier to add links to other content on YouTube into your annotations. Now, when you watch your own videos on YouTube, a crosshair appears on the screen and you can start adding annotations by simply clicking anywhere on the video without having to go into the annotations editor. The new linking options inside the comments now allow you to point to another video, channel page, playlist, group, or search query. You will not be able to link to content outside of YouTube, however.
The YouTube team also highlights the possibility of linking to a video response page to gather feedback from your audience. Is This a Good Thing? The question, of course, is if this is actually a good thing. Too often, users already overuse the annotations to advertise some of their other videos or to remind us that the video is also available in HD (a note that also pops up when you are already watching the video in HD, by the way). Even Google seems to be aware of this, as they provide a help page with instructions for how to turn these annotations off for embedded videos. Omnisio We can only assume that this is the first part of the integration of Omnisio's technology into the core YouTube service. Google acquired Omnisio last July, though it is important to note that the service did a lot more than just video annotations.
