John Stricker

Assignment 1: Information Literacy

1


Part 1-summary
Autonomous cars are becoming more of an interest to companies and possible consumers
especially now with many companies designing their own and many of them are already being
tested on real roads. One case of these real road tests occurred in Washington D.C. where one of
the flaws with the system was made evident. A police officer had gotten out of his car to wave a
car down, and while the robot did stop for the officer it could not interpret the officers hand
signal telling the car to stop and once the officer had moved out of the way the car would have
continued on if not for the driver pressing a button and taking control of the car. The car features
two cameras one that is angled up to see traffic lights and one angle down to see lane lines. In
addition to the cameras there is also a long range radar detector behind the Cadillac logo and a
short range radar detector underneath the front bumper. The front, left, right, and back sides all
have a pair of radar and lasers to detect any cars or pedestrians there. In the spare tire well are
four computers which control all of these lasers cameras and radars, as well as receive GPS data
such as speed limits and maps.
Part 2- search engines
For the search engine comparison I used the two most popular search engines, Google
and Bing. I ran the search driverless cars on both search engines and found two maybe three
of the same articles on both, including the one I used for the summary above. While the articles
where, for the most part different, I did not notice a change in quality from articles on one search
engine to another. The main difference between the two is Bings screen clutter. Google
provides a nice clean format with only what I searched for on the page, save for one
advertisement at the top. While Bing on the other hand has a picture in the background of the
John Stricker
Assignment 1: Information Literacy
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main site as well as a bar at the bottom for recent events, which mostly consist of tabloids, which
may be considered by some to be helpful but not to me. Then once you get to the search page
there is a left column which at the top has news related to driverless cars and underneath are my
actual searches. Then there is the right column which consists of related searches. So all in all
my only problem with Bing was its presentation I simply prefer the clean presentation of Google.
Part 3-TRAAP
1. Written on April 20
th
2013. Not updated.
2. Yes, it relates to my topic.
3. I could not find the Authors name, however I would say that they are not qualified to
write about driverless cars given that they are most likely a journalist and would not
know much about the technology involved.
4. While the source has not been tested for accuracy that I know of I would say that it is
trust worthy because it is from the Economist website.
5. The article was written to inform people of the technologies and relevancy of driver-
less cars. I dont have any reason to believe there is bias present in this article.
Part 4-Scholarly Journals
For the two scholarly journals I used SIRS in order to find them simply because it
is the one I am most familiar with since it was my go to in high school.
To find my articles I simply searched driverless cars.
Part 5- Comparison
After reading over the articles from both the internet and the CCBC Library database
I found that the internet was vastly superior in terms of ease of access. It took about
15 seconds for me to get to my first article on the internet, while on SIRS it took
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Assignment 1: Information Literacy
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considerably longer due to the fact that you have to go through the CCBC library
website and then to SIRS to finally search for a topic. However the first couple of
articles from the internet I wasnt able to use so this is where the problem with the
internet sources arises, some simply arent reliable enough to use, and also many of
the articles are cluttered with advertisements and unnecessary photos. Meanwhile the
scholarly journals are constantly reliable and have nothing but the article there for
you to read.

John Stricker
Assignment 1: Information Literacy
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MLA Work Cited
Brown, Alan S. "Google's Autonomous Car Applies Lessons Learned From
Driverless Races." Mechanical Engineering 133.2 (2011): 31. Business Source
Premier. Web. 21 Sept. 2014.
"Driverless Vehicles? Even in D.C. Streets? An Autonomous Car Takes a Capital
Test Run." Washington Post. The Washington Post, n.d. Web. 21 Sept. 2014.
"Fast Approaching: Driverless Cars." Mechanical Engineering 135.5 (2013): 12-
14. Business Source Premier. Web. 21 Sept. 2014.
"Look, No Hands." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 20 Apr. 2013. Web.
21 Sept. 2014.
"Self-Driving Car Test: Steve Mahan - Google Careers." Self-Driving Car Test: Steve
Mahan - Google Careers. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Sept. 2014.