New Florence. New Renaissance.

India’s changing “coalface”

The country may have other challenges but it is blessed with plenty of sunshine and solar energy is making India confident about getting 60% of its energy needs from non-fossil fuels by 2027. Says The Guardian about recent solar energy progress

“At a reverse auction in Rajasthan on Tuesday, power companies Phelan Energyand Avaada Power each offered to charge 2.62 rupees per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity generated from solar panels they hope to build at an energy park in the desert state. Last year’s previous record lowest bid was 4.34 rupees per kWh .

Analysts called the 40% price drop “world historic” and said it was driven by cheaper finance and growing investor confidence in India’s pledge to dramatically increase its renewable energy capacity.”

It is also leading to ambitious plans for electric vehicles to combat growing smog in its larger cities like in Delhi in picture below.

From The Independent:

“We are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way," coal and mines minister Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session 2017 in New Delhi. “"We are going to make electric vehicles self-sufficient... The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country.”

 

Who cares about driverless? Cars are getting safer by the minute

In my book, Silicon Collar I argued driverless cars are a long way off because our infrastructure, laws, ethics are just not evolving as quickly as car technology. Also, it will be a long time before humans give up their love for driving. But in the meantime, the quest for autonomous driving is having a important unintended consequence – cars are becoming safer, as McKinsey writes:

Around the world, the number of ADAS systems (for instance, those for night vision and blind-spot vehicle detection) rose from 90 million units in 2014 to about 140 million in 2016—a 50 percent increase in just two years. Some ADAS features have greater uptake than others. The adoption rate of surround-view parking systems, for example, increased by more than 150 percent from 2014 to 2016, while the number of adaptive front-lighting systems rose by around 20 percent in the same time frame.

They also have an image of technology increasingly available in cars.

 

On Memorial Day

No talk of technology or innovation, just a few minutes from the beginning of the movie Lincoln where four soldiers play back to the President, his Gettysburg Address.

I never fail to get emotional of feel patriotic watching this

How the Indy 500 has helped the ordinary driver

Technological advancements tested on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's historic 2.5-mile oval have transitioned to everyday production models since the very first race. Some of these innovations have become more ubiquitous than others, but the race has proved a durable bridge between race car and production car.

Automotive News profiles several innovations such as the rearview mirror in 1911, four wheel hydraulic brakes in 1921, seat belts in 1922, all-wheel drive in 1932 and many others

The video below has some interesting moments from over a century of racing at the Brickyard.

The Global Seed Vault

The vault, which protects hundreds of thousands of seeds for every crop needed to produce food in the event of a catastrophe, is buried deep within a mountain on Norway's Spitsbergen Island at the archipelago of Svalbard, located within the Arctic Circle. Known as the "Doomsday" vault, it was built to withstand natural disasters and even nuclear war, but the permafrost melt sent water flooding into the entrance of the vault. The water quickly froze, however, in the vault's subzero controlled interior temperatures and never came close to threatening the seeds.

Now, the Norwegian government is moving quickly to prevent the vault's entrance from flooding again. According to Live Science, plans are underway to build new waterproof walls inside the entry tunnel, and might even build a new entrance in a different spot in the future.

Weather.com

 

The new Surface Pen

I have been traveling with an Apple Pencil and writing on an iPad Pro so was intrigued about Microsoft’s new Pen.

Engadget writes “(Microsoft) claims is the "fastest pen ever" on any platform -- with a 21ms latency, it's supposedly fast enough that it'll feel more like you're writing on paper than glass. There's also a whopping 4,096 pressure points (up from 1,024), reduced parallax (the mismatch between where your pen is and where input appears onscreen), and an Apple Pencil-style tilt feature that lets you apply artistic flourishes like shading. The new Pen will be available in black, burgundy, cobalt blue and platinum colors"

 

A morning with Mike Rowe

One of the most enjoyable things at the Plex conference in Atlanta earlier this month was a chance to listen to and spend a few minutes chatting with Mike Rowe, the host of the Discovery series, Dirty Jobs which profiled all kinds of interesting jobs cleaning sewers, mucking coal and worse.

He is a very entertaining speaker. Importantly, he is humble. He did not record the shows as a high minded TV host. He acted like an apprentice to each of the workers he profiled. As his mother says in his book, Profoundly Disconnected, “if there was a joke to be made, it would always be on Mike, never at the expense of the people he worked with. I liked that”

In listening to him I found so much in common in what I found in my research for Silicon Collar. We have inflicted many manmade wounds on the job economy and yet we are hysterical about machines killing jobs.

Here is what he told Bill Maher

“We’ve got millions of people looking for work and millions of jobs that nobody wants. College graduates are a trillion dollars in debt and struggling to find employment in their field of study. Meanwhile, 88 percent of all the available jobs don’t require a four-year degree. They require specific training. So what do we do? We push a four-year degree like it’s some sort of a Golden Ticket. We remove vocational education from high schools at the time we need it most. We’re lending money we don’t have to kids who can’t pay it back, educating them for jobs that no longer exist. I’m no expert, but I’d say that’s profoundly disconnected.”

I particularly like his poster which you can order here (along with his book) which positions the modern day blue collar worker as more self-fulfilled than a white collar college graduate.

We need a lot more of this thinking.  

 

The Giant GE9X engine

Built using lightweight carbon fiber and 3-D printing, the GE9X is as wide as a Boeing 737 fuselage (yes, it’s a plane engine the size of another plane) and will eventually power Boeing’s 777X, the biggest twinjet ever. Despite its heft, though, the behemoth is cleaner, quieter, and more fuel-efficient than its predecessors.

Wired

 

 

High Visibility

Vollebak, the same company that brought us a pink hoodie designed for maximum relaxation, is launching something new: The Nano Meter 555 Midlayer, which features two details that hack human perception to make you, theoretically, as noticeable as possible.

FastCompany

 

Auto insurance in the autonomous era

The research found that cybersecurity insurance will be the greatest potential driver of new premiums, totaling US$64 billion by 2025, followed by product liability insurance (US$14 billion) and public infrastructure insurance (US$3 billion).
These three new business lines include:

• Cybersecurity:  Protection against remote vehicle theft, unauthorized entry, ransomware and hijacking of vehicle controls, as well as coverage for identity theft, privacy breaches and the theft or misuse of personal data.

• Product liability for sensors and software algorithms:  Manufacturer coverage for failures related to communications (e.g., internet connection), software (including bugs, memory overflow and program defects) and hardware (sensory circuit failure, camera vision loss, and radar and lidar failures).

• Public infrastructure:  Insurance for cloud server systems that manage traffic and road networks, in addition to failure of external sensors and signals; and communication problems originating at the system level. 

Accenture