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Chery J1 review carsguide com au
Paul Gover road tests and reviews the 2011 Chery J1.
Chery J1 3
The price is right on the Chery J1. The first Chinese passenger car to hit the road in Australia always had to be cheap to make an impact, and the bottom line is just $11,990 — on the road. The value is unquestionable, the J1 is the new Australian price leader, and the deal includes 24-7 roadside assistance for the length of the three-year, 100,000-kilometre warranty.
But the J1 is playing catch-up, and not just because Chery of China came to carmaking later than the Japanese and Korean brands that now dominate in Australia. The quality on the car is well below the accepted standard in local showrooms and the J1 also needs some engine room tweaking before the performance is up to par.
Chery is China s largest independent vehicle manufacturer with five assembly lines, two engine factories, a transmission plant and total production last year of 680,000 vehicles. It has ambitious export plans and Australia is its first big target, and a useful test case.
The local Chery importer — Ateco Automotive — believes the dollar deal on the J1 will be more than good enough to draw plenty of buyers, and it has already forced Suzuki to match the bottom line with its tiny Alto. Ateco has already proven the point with the Great Wall utes and SUV it also handles and has big plans for both Chinese brands in coming years.
It s impossible to fault the J1 on the value front. It costs a miserly $11,990, including on-road costs, and the deal provides two airbags, ABS brakes, air-conditioning, power steering, remote keyless entry, alloy wheels, power mirrors and front electric windows. The sound system is MP3 compatible.
The most important missing ingredient is ESP stability control, which means it cannot be sold in Victoria. But there is no Bluetooth, either. Rating the value means lining it up against the smaller — but better finished — Alto that starts at $11,790 with a smaller engine but is being sold at $11,990 driveaway to match the Chery.
It also needs to be compared with something like the impressive new Nissan Micra. The J1 is nearly 30 per cent cheaper than the Nissan, and that says a lot.
There is nothing special about the J1. It s a conventional five-door hatchback with a 1.3-litre baby engine, space for five inside with a reasonable boot, and a five-speed manual gearbox working the front wheels.
Chery is known for its focus on constant innovation and drive towards better quality, well-appointed cars at an affordable price, says Ric Hull, managing director of Ateco Automotive. So far, though, the J1 is a predictable — not outstanding — newcomer.
The J1 has a pleasing design with a shape intended to maximise cabin space, particularly in the rear seats. Adults have no worries about headroom in the little Chery. The dashboard shows a little flair, and some youth focus, but the cabin package is let down — badly — by plastic pieces that don t match or fit together particularly well.
It s something the Chery team needs to fix, and fix fast, to satisfy picky Australian buyers. The sub-standard work also includes body parts that are not properly painted and plastic trim bits which do not do their job properly or fit together well.
Ateco says the J1 is a work-in-progress, but early buyers should not be made into guinea pigs for Chery quality.
No ESP is a big failing. But Ateco promises it will be fitted no later than November. We re also waiting to see what happens when NCAP gets a J1 for some serious independent crash testing.
It definitely doesn t look like a five-star car.
The Chery J1 is not the best car on the road. Not by a long shot. In fact, it is badly under-done in some areas. We can understand the sub-standard quality because Chery is moving into a new and very tough car market in Australia, and Chinese buyers are snapping up anything with wheels.
At least Chinese companies have a history of rapid updates and improvements.
But the J1 is also lacklustre to drive, thanks to poor gearing and a body that feels loose compared to other baby-car choices. The Chery does not like hills, or hill starts, where it takes a lot of revs and some clutch slip to get going.
Thankfully, Ateco promises a change to the final-drive ratio very soon. The engine also has a hanging throttle , something that also blights some Proton models, and it makes smooth driving tough. There is no news on any change there.
Even so, the J1 rides nicely enough, is quiet, has comfy seats and — after all — is very, very cheap. It is basic transport and people will buy the car because it comes at a second-hand price with new-car backup.
It is easy to criticise the J1 and complain about what needs to be improved, but the Chery baby is a first from the brand and China and everyone knows things are only going to get better.
VERDICT: A great deal, but not a great car.
SCORE: 6/10 WE LIKE: Price, price, price WE DON T LIKE: Performance, quality, unproven safety
PRICE: $11,990 driveaway
ENGINE: 1.3-litre four cylinder
OUTPUT: 62kW/122Nm
ECONOMY: 6.7litres/100km
EMISSIONS: 254g/km
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In yesterday's column by Thomas Weber in the WSJ (paid subscription needed), Mr. Weber listed some sites devoted to reviews of digital cameras. I hope I'm not breaking any copyright laws by listing the sites here. Because I'm at work, I've not yet checked any of them, but, based on Mr. Weber's word, here they are:
For anyone about to plunk down hundreds of dollars on photographic equipment, these sites boast must-read material.
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Sensing and Classifying Roadway Obstacles: The Street Bump Anomaly Detection and Decision Support System ∗ Theodora S. Brisimi,† Setareh Ariafar,† Yue Zhang,† Christos G. Cassandras,‡ and Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis‡ Abstract— We develop an anomaly detection and decision support system based on data collected through the Street Bump smartphone application. The system is capable of effectively classifying roadway obstacles into predefined categories using machine learning algorithms, as well as identifying actionable ones in need of immediate attention based on a proposed "anomaly index." We introduce appropriate regularization to the classification algorithms we employ, which has the effect of utilizing a sparse set of relevant features to perform the classification. Further, our novel "anomaly index" allows us to prioritize among actionable obstacles. Results on an actual data set provided by the City of Boston illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our system in practice. Index Terms— Classification, anomaly detection, machine learning, smart cities. I. INTRODUCTION According to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, as much as 50% of US roads and highways are in bad condition, thus, raising the likelihood of accidents. The Massachusetts State Transportation Department [1] received about 1,700 pothole complaints over the first quarter of 2014 and spent more that $800,000 filling them, while the City of Boston filled more than 10,000 potholes. In order to reduce the cost and automate the process of detecting road obstacles, the City has developed a smartphone application called Street Bump. This application makes use of the accelerometer and GPS capabilities of a typical smartphone to identify and locate "bumps" as a vehicle (where the application-carrying smartphone is present) drives through a roadway network. The term "bump" is generically used to describe a variety of obstacles, such as potholes, sunk castings, flat castings, utility patches, catch basins, train tracks, and speed bumps. Clearly, this enables all driving citizens equipped with Street Bump to contribute to a massive and continuous data collection process. The purpose of this paper is to develop an anomaly detection and decision support system driven by the collected Street Bump data. The raw data do not differentiate between "actionable" and "non-actionable" bumps: the former include potholes and sunk castings which are caused by nature or * Research partially supported by the NSF under grants CNS-1239021, IIS-1237022, and IIP-1430145, by the ARO under grants W911NF-11-10227 and W911NF-12-1-0390, by the AFOSR under grant FA9550-121-0113, by the ONR under grants N00014-10-1-0952 and N00014-09-11051, and by the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics of the City of Boston. Special thanks to the City of Boston for collecting the data, and to the Connected Bits company for designing and developing the smartphone application. † Joint first authors. ECE Dept. & Division of Systems Eng., Boston Univ., {tbrisimi, setare, firstname.lastname@example.com. ‡, ECE Dept. & Division of Systems Eng., Boston Univ., 8 Saint Mary's St., Boston, MA 02215, {cgc, email@example.com. accident and require prompt repair, whereas the latter are either expected or known obstacles (e.g., train tracks and speed bumps) which do not require immediate attention. We view the actionable bumps as anomalies which are to be differentiated from the rest. Further, we seek to develop a complete decision support system capable of accurately classifying all detected roadway obstacles into predefined categories (such as actionable and non-actionable) and of quantifying the severity of the actionable ones so as to assist the City in prioritizing them and dispatching repair crews in a timely and cost-effective manner. Our approach is based on extracting features from the data collected, i.e., functions of the data organized into a number of signals (or time series) over time windows associated with a specific bump. We use a standard supervised classification approach assuming we have at our disposal a "labeled" training set. Classifiers trained in this way can subsequently be used to classify new "unlabeled" data. Once the feature extraction process is completed, we follow two complementary approaches. The first approach is based on formulating a basic binary classification problem to differentiate actionable from non-actionable bumps. We employ a subset of supervised learning algorithms that has shown to be effective in a number of other applications (e.g., prediction of heart-related hospitalizations [2]). These algorithms include Support Vector Machines (SVM), AdaBoost and Logistic regression [3]. In some instances, we introduce specific sparsity-inducing regularizations that have the effect of improving the classifier's performance by identifying a subset of most relevant features. The second approach is inspired by anomaly detection problems that appear in a variety of applications (see e.g., [4], [5], [6] and references therein). Anomaly detection methods typically attempt to model "normal" behavior and detect deviations from it – the anomalies. In our setting, we will take advantage of structural properties in the problem. We exploit the fact that most actionable obstacles are due to natural phenomena that produce random obstacle configurations, whereas non-actionable ones are human-made and possess a significant degree of regularity. For example, vibration data from a flat casting fit much better the signature of a harmonic oscillation than those from a pothole. In particular, we quantify this measure of regularity through an "anomaly index" and develop two methods for obtaining such indices which can also be combined into one. The first method is based on a Mean Squared Error (MSE) metric to measure the deviation of a bump signal from that of a simple harmonic oscillation. The second method relies on measuring the entropy [7] of a bump signal so that bumps with higher entropy are assigned a higher anomaly index. Although our work is focused on the problem of anomaly detection for roadway bumps, we have found that our methods apply to a variety of other application areas. As an example, we mention the issue of remotely detecting falls of humans (such as elderly people in their residences) due to accidents or specific medical conditions; once again, accelerometer and GPS data from a smartphone carried by such individuals may be used to both detect a potential fall and localize the incident. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In Sec. II, we describe the nature of the Street Bump data and the feature extraction process. In Sec. III, we present our decision support and anomaly detection system. In Sec. IV, we describe the performance evaluation criteria for our system. In Sec. V, we provide extensive numerical results from actual data provided by the City of Boston through controlled data collection using the Street Bump app, thus, illustrating the feasibility and effectiveness of our system. Finally, we conclude and discuss future work in Sec. VI. On a notational remark we will use lower case bold letters to denote vectors, assume all vectors are column vectors, and for economy of space write x = (x1 , . . . , xn ) for x ∈ Rn . II. FEATURE EXTRACTION A. Attributes recorded by the smartphone The Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics in the City of Boston, in partnership with the Connected Bits company have developed a smartphone application aiming to collect roadway obstacle data from sensors widely available in citizens' smartphones and use them to identify "bumps" which the city can then fix. Before their trip, drivers initialize the app and place their smartphones at a stable location (e.g., on the dashboard or in a cup holder). The app takes care of the rest, utilizing the phone's accelerometer and GPS receiver. It registers a "bump," when the speed of the car is greater than 5 miles per hour and the accelerometer records an absolute value reading of 0.4g or higher along the z-axis. Information regarding the bump, including a time-stamp corresponding to the time when these "trigger" conditions were satisfied, is then transmitted to a remote server. Specifically, the information recorded is: (1) latitude and (2) longitude of the bump location, (3) speed of the vehicle (meters per second), (4) course, which is the heading of the vehicle at the time of the bump (i.e., the angle between the driving direction and a reference direction taken to be North), (5) x-axis, y-axis and z-axis readings from the accelerometer during a time window that includes the bump time-stamp. In particular, this time window starts 0.25 seconds before the time-stamp (recalled from a buffer), is 1 second long, and includes accelerometer readings sampled at 50 Hz (i.e., 50 samples). According to the smartphone settings, in these readings, the x axis points North, the y axis points West and the z axis is in the direction of gravity. We rotate this coordinate system based on the vehicle's course so that the x-axis aligns with the driving direction and the y-axis is perpendicular to it. From now on, we will refer to these three time series (one for each coordinate) as the signatures of the bump. The x-coordinate signature of an anomalous bump is shown in Fig. 1, where the horizontal axis represents time in seconds and the vertical axis measures the acceleration in the x-axis (i.e., driving) direction. Fig. 1. (Left): x-coordinate signature of an anomalous (actionable) bump. (Right): x-coordinate signature of a flat casting (non-actionable). B. Feature construction for the decision support system From the collected data, we seek to form a set of features that are informative, non-redundant and facilitate the subsequent learning steps. We divide each of the three n-long coordinate time series into a number of K bins of length d = bn/Kc. Because the total number of samples is not the same for all bumps, we appropriately truncate each time series to enforce the same number of samples for each coordinate and each bump. For each bump, let x = (x1 , . . . , xdK ) and similarly y, z denote the vector of samples for the x, y, zcoordinates, respectively. Let x(k) = (xd(k−1)+1 , . . . , xdk ), and similarly y(k) , z(k) , k = 1, . . . , K, denote the vector of samples in the k th bin of the x, y, and z coordinate signatures, respectively. Last, we define the operators M [·], R[·] and σ[·] as the average, range and standard deviation of the elements of a vector. Then, the feature set is constructed as follows: • • Basic bump features: From the set of attributes defined above, we retain the latitude and longitude of the bump as well as the speed of the vehicle. Bump distributional features: From the x-coordinate signature, we calculate M [x], σ[x], R[x] and M [x(k) ], σ[x(k) ], R[x(k) ], where k = 1, . . . , K. As an additional feature we take Dx = | arg max xi − arg min xi |. i i Next, we quantize the range of the elements of x into B bins, and compute the empirical measure hB x = (hx (1), . . . , hx (B)) where PdK • t=1 1{xt ∈bth bin} , b = 1, . . . , B, dK where 1{·} is the indicator function. Last, we create a mapping: x → xµ = (M (x(1) ), . . . , M (x(k) )), and we include M [xµ ], σ[xµ ], R[xµ ] into the feature set. The corresponding features are also calculated for the y- and z-coordinate signatures. Temporal dependency features: This set of features captures the dependencies between the signals in each bin for each coordinate. For the x-coordinate signature, we add to the feature set the covariance of the signals in consecutive bins i.e., cov(x(k) , x(k+1) ), ∀k. We also account for covariances between bins further away by hx (b) = including the following two types of features: (a) the maximum covariance Cxx = max cov(x(1) , (xj , . . . , xj+d )), d+1≤j≤d(K−1) and (b) the corresponding time lag Lxx = arg max cov(x(1) , (xj , . . . , xj+d )) − d + 1. d+1≤j≤d(K−1) Correspondingly, we also calculate similar features for the other coordinates. • Cross-coordinate dependency features: This set of features captures the dependencies between the three signatures. We include cov(x(k) , y(k) ), cov(x(k) , z(k) ), cov(y(k) , z(k) ), ∀k, and Cxy , Lxy , Cyx , Lyx , Cyz and Lyz , where definitions are similar as above. For example, Cxy = maxd+1≤j≤d(K−1) cov(x(1) , (yj , . . . , yj+d )). Let us denote by f (i) the feature vector we have formed for each bump i as described above, where i = 1, . . . , N , N being the total number of bumps in the dataset. The dimensionality of the feature vector is denoted by D. To avoid significant mismatch in the ranges of each element of f (i) , we normalize appropriately so that each element is in the [0, 1] range. (SVMs); see next section for details. We found that the latter yields superior performance, roughly doubling the detection rate of actionable bumps. (b) We use the Fourier transforms of the signature and the ∆-filtered signature of the bumps as feature vectors, which leads again to better results. We can therefore conclude that filtered signatures can enhance classification performance. C. Feature construction for the anomaly detection system For the anomaly detection system, we follow a different path to pre-process the collected data. Same as before, we work with the vectors x, y and z. By inspection of the signatures of the bumps (see Fig. 2), one cannot confidently identify the type of bump (i.e., actionable versus nonactionable). In an effort to enhance the differences between the two categories of bumps, we define a differential signal, to which we refer as the "∆-Signature Filter", which evaluates the difference between the values of the signature in consecutive time steps and either accumulates them if there is no change in their sign, or it resets its value to the latest difference otherwise. Thus, for any signal ξ(k), k = 1, 2, . . ., we define: δ(k) = ξ(k) − ξ(k − 1), ∆(k − 1) + δ(k) if δ(k)δ(k − 1) > 0 (1) ∆(k) = δ(k) if δ(k)δ(k − 1) ≤ 0 0 if δ(k) < c Intuitively, the sequence δ(k) captures the vibration in the signature and ∆(k) attempts to capture the trend in the signal. If the increments δ(k) of the signal are consistently positive or negative over some period, this will result in a large value of ∆(k), otherwise ∆(k) resets itself. Noise in the signature appears as small random oscillations. To suppress noise, we pass ∆(k) through a high-pass filter that sets its value to zero if it is below a threshold c as seen in (1); in our case, we have used c = 0.4. Clearly, more obvious patterns are revealed through the ∆-filtered signature; see Fig. 2. To verify this quantitatively, we conducted two more experiments: (a) We use the original signature and the ∆filtered signature of a bump as feature vectors given to a binary classification system using Support Vector Machines Fig. 2. Top: Pothole (actionable) signature and associated ∆-filtered signature with fitted sinusoid. Bottom: Flat Casting (Non-actionable) signature and associated ∆-filtered signature with fitted sinusoid. III. M ETHODOLOGY- D ECISION S UPPORT AND A NOMALY D ETECTION S YSTEM In this section, we describe the methods that comprise the decision support and anomaly detection system. We aim at distinguishing between the actionable and the nonactionable (anomalous) bumps. We use two approaches: (a) a supervised binary classification approach, which classifies bumps as actionable or non-actionable, and (b) an anomaly detection approach which attempts to identify bumps that are significantly different from the rest. In the first approach, we employ some of the established machine learning algorithms, namely, Support Vector Machines (SVMs), logistic regression and AdaBoost with stumps as the weak learner. Because of the limited size of our dataset (labeled bump samples are expensive to gather) and to avoid over-fitting, we seek to limit the number of features that are used to make the classification decision, which leads us to introduce sparsityinducing reguralizers. This results into an `1 -regularized logistic regression and a sparse SVM. By combining results from the methods above, we build a unified prioritized decision support system. In the second approach, we define the notion of a normal bump signal in two different ways – a normal signal has a sinusoidal pattern or a normal signal has an expected range of amplitude – and we measure how different a test bump is from the normal pattern. A. Soft-Margin SVM and Sparse Soft-Margin SVM SVMs seek to find a separating hyperplane w0 f (i) + b, where f (i) is the D-dimensional feature vector of the ith bump, between samples (bumps) of different classes [8]. The solution to the SVM problem is the hyperplane that maximizes the margin between the two classes, i.e., the distance from the decision surface to the closest data points. Oftentimes in real-world problems, the sample points are not linearly separable. For this reason, the original space is mapped through a kernel function into a higher dimensional space, where presumably linear separation can be achieved [8], [9]. What is more, we prefer a solution that better separates the majority of the data while ignoring a few misclassified samples (soft-margin SVM) [9]. This is achieved through a penalty term in the objective function of the SVM problem with a parameter C that controls the relative weighting between the goal of making the margin large and ensuring that most examples have been correctly classified. The parameters of the kernel as well as the regularization parameter C (cf. (2)) are selected through cross-validation. In an effort to limit the number of features used by the classifier, we introduce a sparse soft margin SVM. Specifically, we impose two penalties in the SVM objective function: the aforementioned regularization penalty with the PD C parameter, and an `1 -norm penalty t=1 |wt | for the vector of coefficients w that define the SVM hyperplane. The optimization problem is formulated as follows, where y i ∈ {−1, 1} are labels (non-actionable or actionable, respectively) associated with the ith bump, i = 1, . . . , N , PN PD minz,w,b,ξ 12 ||w||2 + C i=1 ξi + P t=1 zt s.t. y i (w0 f (i) + b) ≥ 1 − ξi , ∀i, (2) ξi ≥ 0, ∀i, zt ≥ wt , zt ≥ −wt , t = 1, . . . , D. In this formulation, ξ's are slack variables that allow for some bumps to be misclassified and P is a parameter that controls sparsity, i.e., the number of features which will end up with non-zero coefficients wt . B. Logistic Regression and `1 Regularization Logistic Regression [10] is a linear, fairly simple classifier, widely used in many classification applications. For the ith bump labeled as y i ∈ {0, 1} (non-actionable or actionable, respectively), and given the feature vector f (i) , we model the posterior probability of the actionable class as a logistic function: 1 , P (y i = 1|θ, β; f (i) ) = hθ,β (f (i) ) = 1 + exp(−θ 0 f (i) − β) where (θ, β) are model parameters. It follows that i i P (y i |θ, β; f (i) ) = (hθ,β (f (i) ))y (1 − hθ,β (f (i) ))1−y , and the log-likelihood L(θ, β) of the data set takes the form (assuming independence of the training data): N X L(θ, β) = y i log(hθ,β (f (i) ))+(1 − y i ) log(1−hθ,β (f (i) )). i=1 The parameters (θ, β) are selected by maximizing the loglikelihood using a gradient method. For the test samples, decisions are made by thresholding the log-likelihood ratio of the actionable class over the non-actionable class. In the `1 regularized Logistic Regression [11], when maximizing the log-likelihood we impose in the objective function an extra penalty term proportional to |θ|, which has the effect of "selecting" a sparse set of features. This prevents overfitting and leads to a lower complexity model. C. AdaBoost with Stumps Boosting is an ensemble supervised learning method that constructs a strong classifier as a linear combination of "simple" "weak" classifiers [12]. A weak learner is a classifier that has accuracy just slightly better than random guessing. A decision stump, that we use as the weak learner, makes a prediction based on the value of just a single input feature. AdaBoost keeps a distribution of weights for the training sample points. During each round a weak classifier is trained, which tries to focus on the "difficult" data points (the ones that have been misclassified by the previous weak classifier) and the weights are updated based on the misclassification error. In the end, AdaBoost combines the decisions of these weak classifiers using an optimally weighted majority vote. The number of iterations is selected through cross-validation. D. Decision Support System for Prioritizing Anomalies All methods outlined so far, classify a test bump by comparing a classifier function of its features g(f (i) ) to a threshold . In particular, a bump is classified as actionable if g(f (i) ) ≥ . We can therefore use the distance g(f (i) ) − as a way to prioritize among actionable bumps; the higher the distance the more confident we are about the bump being actionable. Logistic regression in particular, provides explicitly the likelihood of a bump being actionable, which can naturally be used to order actionable bumps. Furthermore, it is possible to seek consensus among the three classifiers, thus, further reducing false alarm rates. E. Sinusoidal Fitting and a Mean Squared Error Metric The idea behind this method is that the ∆-filtered signature of non-actionable bumps exhibits a regular pattern very similar to a sinusoidal function. Therefore, if we compare a sine (or cosine) function to the ∆-filtered signature of a bump (see Fig. 2), we can calculate a Mean Squared Error (MSE) as a measure of how good the fit is. The MSE captures the degree of bump irregularity, and is used in defining an anomaly index, as discussed in Section IV. We begin by identifying time intervals such that ∆(k) = 0 over more than one contiguous sample points. By eliminating such intervals, since they contain no valuable information, we concentrate on a typical interval [t0 , t0 + Td ] over which the continuous signal ∆(t) (see Fig. 2) is such that ∆(t) 6= 0 except possibly at a finite number of sampling points ti ∈ [t0 , t0 +Td ], i = 0, 1, . . . , N , with tN = t0 +Td . We compare this signal to a sinusoid f (t) = A sin(ωt − θ0 ) + b where the parameters A, ω, θ0 , and b are determined as follows. Let zj be the jth zero crossing of ∆(t) in [t0 , t0 + Td ] and define ∆max = max t∈(zj ,zj+1 ) {∆(t)}, j = 0, 1, . . . , nz . j P nz max 1 . Letting θd be the observed Then, A = nz i=1 ∆j number of periods of ∆(t) in [t0 , t0 + Td ], we set ω = Tθdd PN and θ0 = ωt0 . Finally, b = N1 k=1 ∆(tk ). Thus, 1 PN [f (tk ) − ∆(tk )]2 (3) M SE = N k=1 is the MSE measuring the proximity of ∆(t) to f (t) = A sin(ωt − θ0 ) + b. We expect that non-actionable bumps have a better fit, hence lower MSE. Therefore, bumps with larger MSE, are identified as anomalies (see Fig. 2). F. A Bump Entropy Metric This method is inspired by the observation that the amplitude of ∆-filtered signatures of actionable and non-actionable bumps have different ranges (typically for the actionable ones the range is [−2, 2] (see Fig. 2), while the range for nonactionable ones is [−1, 1]). We use the information-theoretic concept of entropy to characterize the degree of irregularity of a ∆-filtered signature. For simplicity, let us concentrate on the positive amplitude range of ∆(t), i.e., [0, ∆max ] and partition this interval into subintervals [ui−1 , ui ], i = 1, . . . , n, so P that u0 = 0 and un = ∆max . We then define H + = n − i=1 pi log(pi ) to be the bump entropy of the positive ∆-filtered signature, where pi is the fraction of time during which ∆(t) ∈ [ui−1 , ui ] (similarly for H − pertaining to the non-positive amplitude range of ∆(t)). Formally, the total time during which ∆(t) ∈ [ui−1 P, ui ] involves the inverse images ∆−1 (ui ) so that pi = T1d j ∆−1 (uj+1 ) − ∆−1 (uj ), where Td is the length of the time interval considered (we omit details). Further, in order to amplify the effect of extreme points in the signature, i.e., unusually large positive (in the vicinity of ∆max ) or negative amplitudes, we modify H = H + + H − to P H = − i log(pi ) (4) In this way, a small number of extreme amplitudes can substantially increase the bump entropy by decreasing the logarithmic term values. B. Anomaly detection The MSE metric in (3) and bump entropy in (4) both measure the degree of irregularity of a bump in different ways. By combining them, we define an Anomaly Index AI: AI = λ(M SE) + (1 − λ)H (5) associated with each bump, where λ ∈ [0, 1] is a weight selected to place more emphasis on the MSE or the entropy. Based on AI, we can then generate a list in descending order so that the first several entries of the list identify the bumps most likely to be actionable and requiring immediate attention. V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Our results are based on data collected by the City of Boston containing both controlled (an actual bump is driven over multiple times) and uncontrolled (bumps are detected from random vehicle trips in the city). The final dataset consists of 813 bumps (21 from controlled data, 792 from uncontrolled data). A signature contains anywhere between 48 to 65 samples, with the mode of the distribution being at 57. In our experiments, we have set K (the number of bins to partition the signatures) to 3, and B (the number of bins for the empirical measure hB x (·)) to 5. The feature vector that we construct for the binary classification formulation consists of 90 features. We have averaged the features over multiple records of a bump for controlled data (for each bump in this set, there are 2−4 readings.) The data set is roughly balanced since 59% of it is labelled as actionable and 41% as nonactionable. When processing the categories of the data to form the labels, we have omitted "screenable" categories, such as crosswalks, expansion joints, train tracks, speed bumps and road distortion/depression, since their location is known to the City, thus, they can be eliminated from our dataset. We have also omitted data for bumps described as "unidentifiable" or otherwise ill-conditioned. In Fig. 3, a comparison between the performance of our five supervised classification methods is presented. The ROC for each method illustrates the trade-off between the miss detection rate and the false alarm error rates. RBF SVM refers to SVM using a radial basis function kernel [3]. IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION A. Supervised classification We evaluate the performance of the learning algorithms measuring two error rates. The miss detection rate corresponds to the ratio of the actionable bumps that we wrongly predicted to be non-actionable. The false alarm rate corresponds to the ratio of the non-actionable bumps that we wrongly predicted to be actionable. By changing the decision threshold when classifying the test samples, we produce multiple pairs of the two error rates. We report the performance by plotting the miss detection rate versus the false alarm rate. This produces what we will call (with a slight abuse of terminology) the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. Typically, one chooses a point on the ROC curve to operate on, depending on the relative cost assigned to false alarms and miss-detections. Fig. 3. ROC curves for the 5 classification methods. AdaBoost and `1 regularized logistic regression perform similarly (since their ROC curves are close to each other). AdaBoost as a boosting learning algorithm achieves better performance compared to logistic regression and RBF-SVM. Sparse SVM achieves a better performance than RBF-SVM, and correspondingly `1 regularized logistic regression is better than logistic regression. This indicates that combining feature selection techniques with the learning algorithms results in better prediction results. Comparing all five methods, Sparse SVM is the strongest classification method in all situations. If we fix a value of the false alarm rate, Sparse SVM provides the lowest miss detection rate, and if we fix a miss detection rate, the algorithm achieves the lowest false alarm rate error. Logistic regression seems to be the weakest classifier in all of our experiments. Notice that with 10% false alarm rate, we can correctly identify half the actionable bumps, which is a level of performance that can enable practical use of our algorithm according to City of Boston officials. In Fig. 4, we plot the anomaly index values that correspond to each bump in our dataset using a weight λ = 0.5 in (5), which was empirically found to yield the highest accuracy rate (88%) for detecting actionable bumps. In Fig. 5 we show the top-28 of the bump list generated in descending order of anomaly index AI, thus, identifying bumps most likely to be actionable. Marked in yellow is the only non-actionable bump in the top-28 of this list. VI. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK The goal of this work is to differentiate between actionable bumps which correspond to obstacles that require immediate attention, and non-actionable bumps (e.g., cobblestone streets, speed bumps) for which no immediate action is needed. This classification enables City officials to efficiently and effectively prioritize repairs. We developed two complementary methods to that end. The first method uses classification algorithms but introduces appropriate regularizations to select a sparse set of most useful features. The second method introduces an anomaly index which captures the degree of regularity of a bump, and uses this index to differentiate between more "normal" bumps (non-actionable) from the "anomalous" (actionable) bumps. As a next step of this work, it is important to be able to differentiate between different types of obstacles; for example, to distinguish a pothole from a poorly repaired sunk casting. The vision is that the accelerometer and GPS data collected by the app can be used in additional applications. An example is detecting wet or icy road conditions or obstacles causing vehicles to experience abrupt motions in a horizontal/lateral, rather than vertical direction. All these results, combined with the ones by our decision support system, could potentially be integrated to create a global "road smoothness" or "road quality" metric, available to all citizens through appropriate web sites, or specialized apps, or even integrated into Google Maps, that can then be used to select the best route! R EFERENCES Fig. 4. Fig. 5. Normalized anomaly index values (λ = 0.5). Bump list in descending AI order with weight λ = 0.5. [1] http://boston.cbslocal.com/2014/04/09/massachusetts-to-set-aside-40million-to-fix-potholes/. [2] W. Dai, T. S. Brisimi, W. G. Adams, T. Mela, V. Saligrama, and I. C. Paschalidis, "Prediction of hospitalization due to heart diseases by supervised learning methods," International Journal of Medical Informatics, 2014. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2014.10.002 [3] T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman, The elements of statistical learning: Data mining, inference, and prediction, 2nd ed. Springer, 2009. [4] J. Wang, D. Rossell, C. G. Cassandras, and I. C. Paschalidis, "Network anomaly detection: A survey and comparative analysis of stochastic and deterministic methods," in 2013 IEEE 52nd Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC). IEEE, 2013, pp. 182–187. [5] I. C. Paschalidis and G. Smaragdakis, "Spatio-temporal network anomaly detection by assessing deviations of empirical measures," IEEE/ACM Trans. Networking, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 685–697, 2009. [6] J. Wang and I. C. Paschalidis, "Statistical traffic anomaly detection in time-varying communication networks," IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2015, in print. [7] C. E. Shannon, "A mathematical theory of communication," ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 3–55, 2001. [8] C. Cortes and V. Vapnik, "Support-vector networks," Machine learning, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 273–297, 1995. [9] J. Shawe-Taylor and N. Cristianini, Kernel methods for pattern analysis. Cambridge university press, 2004. [10] C. M. Bishop et al., Pattern recognition and machine learning. Springer New York, 2006. [11] P. Pudil, J. Novoviˇcov´a, and J. Kittler, "Floating search methods in feature selection," Pattern recognition letters, vol. 15, no. 11, pp. 1119– 1125, 1994. [12] R. Polikar, "Ensemble based systems in decision making," Circuits and systems magazine, IEEE, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 21–45, 2006.
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Four award-winning Japanese women poets will present their work in this bilingual poetry performance reading together with their translators.
Living between California and Kumamoto, Hiromi Ito will read her poetry with her award-winning US translator Jeffrey Angles.
Living in Belgrade, Kayoko Yamasaki is a poet of the Japanese diaspora. She will read her poems together with Indian/Australian poet Subhash Jaireth.
Tokyo based Harumi Kawaguchi will read from her latest Takami Jun award winning collection with Canberra based poet Melinda Smith.
Fascinated by Japanese dialects, Takako Arai will read from her latest work exploring the voices of Tohoku with NZ/Australian poet Jen Crawford.
Updated: 24 April, 2017/Responsible Officer: Dean, ANU College of Asia & the Pacific/Page Contact: CAP Web Team


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Escali Instant Read Dial Thermometer NSF Listed (Celsius) (AH2-C)
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Highbrow and ethnically diverse, West Vancouver has long enjoyed a privileged status in local real estate circles. An exclusive destination for the rich and upwardly mobile, it is a world unto itself separated from downtown Vancouver by the forest of Stanley Park and the waters of Burrard Inlet. Waterfront mansions are as desirable here as West Coast Modernist homes on the slopes of Cypress Mountain, where British Pacific Properties has been building since the 1930s.
However, don't let the term "British Properties" fool you current residents in the district's many neighbourhoods reflect the cultures who drive business and investment in the Lower Mainland from upper-crust English to cultured Persian and tight-knit Ismaili residents, as well as a growing Chinese population.
The laid-back lifestyle and taste for fine living is reflected in the shops, restaurants and recreational amenities offered in West Vancouver. Park Royal, the district's original shopping centre, complements village-style clusters of shops along Marine Drive and waterfront neighbourhoods such as Caulfeild, Eagle Harbour and Horseshoe Bay. Award-winning architecture characterizes the local community centres, often nestled beside verdant playing fields with ocean views. And above, Cypress Mountain with its ski slopes beckons.
West Vancouver average benchmark prices for detached homes are approximately $1.8 million, while average condo prices are $637,000. View West Vancouver MLS® listings and upcoming open houses
West Vancouver Amenities
West Vancouver Shopping
Park Royal is West Vancouver's original shopping centre, with a fashion-dominant north mall and a food- and service-oriented south mall. Retail villages at Ambleside, Dundarave and Horseshoe Bay, as well as Caulfeild Village Shopping Centre, offer local alternatives serving local neighbourhoods.
Schools and Education in West Vancouver
Primary schools
- Caulfeild Elementary School
- Cedardale Elementary School
- Chartwell Elementary School
- Cypress Park Primary School
- Eagle Harbour Primary School
- Gleneagles Elementary School
- Hollyburn Elementary School
- Irwin Park Elementary School
- Lions Bay Community School
- Pauline Johnson Elementary School
- Ridgeview Elementary School
- West Bay Elementary School
- Westcot Elementary School
Secondary schools
- Rockridge Secondary School
- Sentinel Secondary School
- West Vancouver Secondary School
Private Schools
- Mulgrave K-12 School
- Collingwood K-12 School
West Vancouver Cafés and Restaurants
West Vancouver abounds in coffee shops and restaurants, from Five Guys Burgers and Fries in Park Royal to Bean Around the World in Ambleside and Salmon House on the Hill in British Properties. Casual fine dining prevails at Beach House at Dundarave Pier and The Boathouse at Horseshoe Bay.
West Vancouver Sports and Recreation
West Vancouver's community centres and marinas bring together indoor and outdoor enthusiasts in a variety of settings, while cycling clubs and golf courses, such as Capilano Golf & Country Club and the precincts of Hollyburn Country Club, offer plenty of diversions for the discerning resident. The slopes of Cypress Mountain offer world-class skiing, while the Baden-Powell trail is enjoyed by joggers and hikers alike.
West Vancouver Transportation
West Vancouver's "Blue Buses" serve neighbourhoods west of the Capilano River, and offer service to downtown Vancouver and North Vancouver. Upper Levels Highway connects the district with ferries from Horseshoe Bay to Howe Sound and Vancouver Island, and the highway becomes the Sea-to-Sky route that leads to Whistler.
West Vancouver Property Statistics
|Home prices*
*Source: Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, benchmark for September 2013
West Vancouver Demographics
Population* 44,058 (2010) *Source: Statistics Canada, 2006 Census
|40 to 59
|20 to 39
|5 to 19
|0 to 4
*Source: Statistics Canada, 2006 Census
*Source: Statistics Canada, 2006 Census
*Source: Statistics Canada, 2006 Census


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NEWPORT NEWS — Herman Barnes, 87, died Tuesday, June 28, 2005. Herman was a native of North Carolina and had been a Peninsula resident since 1958. He retired from Payne Air Corp. in Newport News after 35 years of service.
He was a charter member of St. Luke's United Methodist Church and was a member of the church choir. He was a member of the Swinging Singers and the PAA. He loved music, and played the fiddle and harmonica, and was always ready to play a tune. He was a loving father and grandfather.


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Rockafella Media is looking for a young writer/researcher for a 10 part web series. Candidates studied Journalism/Mass Communication are preferably welcoming for this vacancy,
The Company is preferably someone with basic knowledge of journalism and a flare for human interest stories. The work is Bollywood Related. The interested applicants mail your CV to firstname.lastname@example.com
ADDED BY; Kunal Rohra[sibwp_form id=3]


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Out of all the Kevin Costner movies I have seen, I can honestly say that
``The Bodyguard`` held my attention throughout the entire movie.
It`s simple: the man has the worst haircut I have ever seen on a human being in my life. I believe it to be the result of either a barber with poor depth perception, or perhaps an attack by a hyperactive 6-year-old with hedge clippers. Either way, it`s pretty darn unattractive.


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Am I feeling pissed off, or am I just terribly sad? I know I feel something, cuz there's sort of a hollow pain in the pit of my gut.
Why, you might ask? Ok, you might not, but it's my blog and I'll blather if I want to.
Two weeks ago, I got a Facebook friend request from my sister's son. Not acting on my first impulse, I did NOT fire back an "Are you effing nuts?" answer. Best Friend advised I pray about it, which I did. Favorite Cousin is suspicious…like me. But really, I have no interest in being a part of the family whose Matriarch-in-Waiting has already disowned me and my family. Not just because of a FB thing, anyway. I still have the emails I got from this young man's mother.
Today, I got a Facebook message from this same child. Here's the text of it:
I would like to let you know you.. Well how do I put this in a way you will understand oh I got it!! You're a stupid hoe!:)
I'm a lot of things, but 'stupid' and 'hoe' ain't two of 'em.
This has given me an opportunity to practice the advice I give others all the time, from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. I paraphrase:
"We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. [] We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. [] God save me from being angry. Thy Will be done."
I also posted Alex' words at Facebook, where anyone whose Friend request I've accepted can see them. And they're here, too. I have no plans for answering back or tattling to his mother or grandmother. I already know he knows he has a Right To Free Speech. Cain't hide nuthin' in the cyberworld, can ya?
Wow. That really helped. I think that pain means I'm just hungry!


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Winning The War Against Stale, Moldy Flavored Specialty Coffee
When it comes to coffee, flavor is king. Roasters around the world pay huge sums to purchase single-origin varieties that yield distinct flavor and aromatic characters. Their customers also pay a premium for a sip. Often, however, the subtle differences and undertones are lost by the time the coffee arrives …Learn more


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Our position on Bitcoin forks
Here we go again.
It seems that not a month goes by without confused messages in the Bitcoin community about yet another Bitcoin fork. In 2017 alone, we wrote articles trying to help you make sense of things like the proposed Bitcoin Unlimited fork, the proposed SegWit fork and then the (actual) Bitcoin Cash fork.
What are Bitcoin forks?
As our previous articles explained: Bitcoin is an exciting and open technology, built on a model of consensus. There are various parties — Bitcoin miners, developers, users and platforms— that all have some authority and input as how they want Bitcoin to operate, but none with ultimate authority.
The Bitcoin network is constantly improved through various software proposals and updates. Occasionally, however, some of these parties may disagree about the implementation or non-implementation of certain proposals.
They might even agree about a problem — say, fixing slow Bitcoin transactions— but disagree about how to solve it — larger blocks (and just how large), dynamic blocks, changing how the information is stored, transmitted, and so on. This means that there will probably always be many different proposals of how some people think that Bitcoin should work.
Bitcoin is software. This means developers can simply fork from the current Bitcoin software branch, and bring a new version into existence, which will operate by a new set of rules. If you had one Bitcoin before the fork, you'd have one Bitcoin and one newly created coin after the fork. This is what happened with Bitcoin Cash in 2017.
This isn't unlike the way you can create your very own currency with a printer and few sheets of paper at home. It might be a simple technical task, but things generally stall when it comes to branding, distribution, trust, security, improvements and acceptance.
Will Luno support any upcoming forks?
Bitcoin is an ever-evolving technology and we can't definitively say what the future will hold. Below are the notable fork proposals and Luno's position on them. We'll update this table if there are any changes.
|Bitcoin Unlimited
|~Apr 2017
|Lost support. No fork
|Jul 2017
|Majority support. Implemented without fork
|Bitcoin Cash
|Aug 2017
|Forked. Luno added BCH withdrawal & sell ability
|Bitcoin Gold
|~25 Oct 2017
|Lacking sufficient community traction, security and other concerns. Luno will not support the fork
|~Nov 2017
|Fork suspended
Why won't you support [insert new fork name here]?
Since we're getting inundated with queries about many proposed Bitcoin forks, we'd first like to repeat that our number one priority is keeping our customers' money —local and digital currency— safe. Many forks come with various security risks, which could result in the loss of funds.
Secondly, we have a vision (and a responsibility) to make it safe and easy to buy, sell and learn about Bitcoin. Most of these Bitcoin fork proposals don't add significant value to the ecosystem and generally just adds complexity and confusion to the market. The opposite of easy.
These are distractions that unnecessarily complicate the industry and divert limited resources, such as:
- Engineering resources needed to add the ability to buy, sell, send, receive and store the new tokens
- Internal processes in storing and securing the tokens in hot and cold wallets etc.
- Design resources, adding more complexity to products
- Community support resources needed in helping customers use, understand and fix issues related to each new token
Lastly, there are thousands of alternatives to Bitcoin, known as altcoins. Many of the proposed Bitcoin forks ultimately create just another altcoin with low or no value. Customers who want access to any of those new altcoin chains should move their Bitcoin to a compatible platform. We can't make any recommendations for these third-party platforms, but please do your research about the security of the new chain and stay clear from fraudsters.
Note that you don't "double your money" during a fork. Just because you have some newly forked tokens, doesn't necessarily mean that they will have any value, now or in the future.
Fork policy
If a new fork is announced, we will observe its market adoption and provide a level of support accordingly.
For example, in the case of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), there was significant interest from the community. It was listed on multiple reputable exchanges, and the price traded above 0.1 BTC for months. We, therefore, provided the ability to withdraw or sell BCH.
However, if there is a fork that isn't embraced by a significant subset of the community, and is not listed by reputable exchanges, we won't provide support for it. Our goal is always to ensure that customers don't lose value associated with their funds.
The future of digital currencies
All money and all technologies move along a long, winding road. They're constantly evolving over time. Bitcoin may one day become a widely-implemented, international payment mechanism. It may also primarily (remain to) be used as an alternative asset class, a store of value that is relatively easy and cheap to send around.
Only time will tell. In the meanwhile, we remain committed to being the bridge people use to cross to get to the future of finance, helping people switch between local and digital currencies, and make the entire process as simple as possible.