IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Car Crash 2 - John Dunn, Consultant,, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Another autmobile crash took place in Long Beach , NY on Friday, April 19^th. It was reported on line. Two screen shots placed together below show a wrecked Audi and the truck that it crashed into. The front end of the Audi was collapsed.

The reference to an “oil truck” is incorrect. The red tag on the truck displays the number 1203 which indicates that the truck was hauling gasoline, not oil. If there had been a tank rupture, the gasoline could have been ignited in which case, a fire could have immolated the car, the truck and much of the surrounding area.

Some years ago, a gasoline truck’s tank was ruptured on Sunrise Highway just east of Newbridge Road in Bellmore, NY. The resulting fire destroyed that truck plus a nearby automobile repair shop on Sunrise Highway’s south side. Today, an automobile dealership is on that site having replaced the earlier business.

We should be grateful that history did not repeat itself, at least not this time.

Avoiding A Medicine Mistake - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I have medical issues which require that I follow a prescribed regimen of medications which need to be taken as directed at particular times of day and night. One day, I almost made a mistake which would not have killed me I think, but which did alarm me just a little.

Some of my medicine bottles look very much alike. One day, I happened to reach for a wrong bottle on the shelf and I was just about to take it when I noticed my error. I was startled.

I went back and got the proper bottle, but I wanted to make sure I’d never slip up like that again.

I took a magic marker and I marked the label of each bottle with GREAT BIG LETTERS to cue me in as to that bottle’s contents.  I even marked the bottles that were of unique size. Now when I reach for something, those great big letters stand out and YELL to me what I’m reaching for.

So far, no further mistakes.

Car Crash - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I came across this terrible scene at the corner of Grand Avenue and DeMott Avenue in Baldwin, NY. I grabbed this cell phone picture on impulse, but it offers an opportunity to speculate as a non-expert on the causitive sequence of events if only as food for thought.

I suspect that the grey car was traveling northbound on Grand Avenue at well In excess of the posted 30 mph speed limit and that the car’s driver lost control and swerved into the oncoming traffic lane in front of the southbound van. The driver of the van saw an impending head-on collision and tried to avoid that by swerving to the left, but there wasn’t enough time to complete that evasion. Thus the car struck the van’s passenger side doing extreme damage to both vehicles.  

Repeating now that this scenario description is speculative on the part of a non-expert with no training in forensics, but it does compel one to quietly and soberly think.

Windows Not Responding - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I have a 32-bit desktop PC which came with 32-bit Windows Vista and from what I have read, that PC cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. With more and more websites becoming incompatible with Windows Vista, I decided to “upgrade” the PC to 32-bit Windows 10. The result has been an utter calamity.

With the new operating system installed, crashes have become quite frequent, keystrokes and mouse clicks can take as long as several seconds to as long half an hour to take effect and these kinds of screen messages keep coming up:

I feel cheated.

I made my purchase of Windows 10 in good faith, I chose the 32-bit Windows 10 version for its touted compatibility with my existing 32-bit PC, I made all the proper moves for its installation and the outcome is truly substandard. (It is a struggle to keep my vocabulary civil and polite.)

Has this happened to anyone else? Is there any remedy?

AI Hallucinations - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

A system of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has to be “trained” before being used.

That training consists of scouring the Internet for tons and tons of postings from which the AI system derives and then presents an answer to a user’s question. There is an illusion of intelligence, but an illusion is all that response is. The difficulties arise when a human sees the AI output and construes it to be the product of conscious, intelligent, sentient and thoughtful analysis. When the answer is clearly none of those things, the AI system is known to “hallucinate”.

When the answer is simply wrong, that wrongness might or might not be detected by the user.

Now imagine a newly assembled AI system which is trained only on Winnie The Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, on Grimm’s Fairy Tales, on Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes and maybe on the Walt Disney, Warner Brothers and Walter Lantz cartoons.

A serious minded user now comes along and asks “How can I fly to the moon?”

The non-hallucinatory reply would probably be “Get on top of a cow.”

Elsie? Are you there?