davidrhunt's comments

davidrhunt | 2 years ago | on: California Allows Cities to Catch Speeding Drivers with Automated Cameras

Lots of info from NHTSA [1]. Like many complex things, it's tricky. "While the presence of a red light camera system has reflected increased numbers of lower impact rear end crashes at intersections where the systems are installed resulting from drivers stopping for the red light, research has also found a reduction in more dangerous offset and right angle crashes at intersections with red light cameras".

In general it seems like a win to me but if you get into technicalities then yes, some research has shown more low-impact rear end collisions. They go on to say "Additional studies may provide greater insight into whether or not such crashes persist where the technology is in place for longer periods of time. The effect of warning signs, public education, and familiarity with the presence of the system in the fullness of time is not clear."

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures/countermeasures/2...

davidrhunt | 2 years ago | on: California Allows Cities to Catch Speeding Drivers with Automated Cameras

Income based fines are used elsewhere [1] to try and counter some of these issues. Not sure of the barriers for this type of approach in the US but I think it would be more effective than flat fines with leniency for lower-income offenders which seem to be the approach often taken.

For the CA bill: "People who meet certain income or housing criteria can also receive deductions of these fines anywhere from 50 to 80%." [2] This seems much less effective than something that is based on income.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

[2] https://ktla.com/news/local-news/if-speed-cameras-are-instal...

davidrhunt | 8 years ago | on: No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price

> This is a very wrong assumption.

The citation provided further down in the article is [1]. Dr. Olive is thorough in attempting to remove sources of bias and conducts a set of fully double blind listening tests in order to come to the conclusion: "The results provide evidence that trained listeners preferred the headphones perceived to have the most neutral, spectral balance".

> A good test for intermodulation distortion (the big white elephant in the audio room) will REALLY give you a hint of which headphone will be least annoying to the ear when listening to loud complex music like classical music, vocal music, etc.

Where is this proven?

[1] http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-relationship-betwe...

davidrhunt | 8 years ago | on: No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price

> I strongly recommend you pick up the book Dr Toole wrote for a non technical audience: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction-Psychoacoustics-Lo...

I second this recommendation. Chapter Two of Dr. Toole's book is titled "Preserving the Art" and directly addresses the concerns you're raising. He uses a great quote at the end of this chapter:

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted". - Einstein

Dr. Toole then spends 500 pages addressing how you can correlate objective and subjective evaluation of loudspeakers. It's a great read.

davidrhunt | 8 years ago | on: No correlation between headphone frequency response and retail price

> Can you really quantify nonlinearities from a sin sweep of any sort? Not that I'd expect a decent set of headphones to have material nonlinearities unless seriously overdriven.

You can using a properly structured log sine sweep but not with a linear sine sweep. This is why the paper mentions "Log sine sweeps rather than linear sine sweeps were employed to allow verification that non-linear distortion components were virtually absent."

You can read up more on why here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/abc8/3f1297e5c033b8322f3d90...

davidrhunt | 11 years ago | on: SpaceX Soft Lands Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage

I believe it is because of this:

> However, our next couple launches are for very high velocity geostationary satellite missions, which don’t allow enough residual propellant for landing.

Based on the press release they plan on using Falcon Heavy for this type of launch in the future but it sounds like that project isn't ready for primetime yet.

davidrhunt | 11 years ago | on: Supreme court: Warrantless cell phone searches illegal [pdf]

Agreed. I also really like this passage later on:

"These cases require us to decide how the search incident to arrest doctrine applies to modern cell phones, which are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy."

davidrhunt | 14 years ago | on: Spotify bitrategate: 320kbps premium quality not there yet

I would be interested in what the source for this statement was.

According to recent research done specifically on high school aged students listening preferences conducted at Harman International the opposite is true: http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2010/06/some-new-evidence-that...

"When all 12 trials were tabulated across all listeners, the high school students preferred the lossless CD format over the MP3 version in 67% of the trials (slide 16). The CD format was preferred in 145 of 216 trials (p<0.001)."

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