New Florence. New Renaissance.

Blockchain in 2 minutes

Saving the planet, fixing healthcare, replacing conventional currency—there is apparently nothing that the shared-database technology known as blockchains can’t fix. At least, that’s the impression given by the horde of governments, banks, entrepreneurs, and tech companiesworking on the technology. But what is a blockchain and why the excitement? If you’ve got 2 minutes, WIRED can explain.

 

The most entertaining baseball game ever?

Superlatives about one of the wildest games ever played....

I’ve covered every World Series game since 1975. Game 5 was the most insanely entertaining I’ve ever seen. That’s not the same thing as “best,” a distinction usually reserved for World Series games with the highest stakes, such as the torturously thrilling Game 7 just 361 days ago when the Cubs won their first title in 108 years. The amazements of Game 5 fall into a different category: glorious games of continuous disbelief when all our baseball expectations, built over our lifetimes, are shredded by an unseen clown and tossed in our grinning faces.

Washington Post

Because of the volley of comebacks and the high-leverage home runs, this game established itself as one of the most compelling in World Series history. By averaging the win probability added — basically, the degree to which each play contributes to a victory — across all the plays in a game, it’s possible to quantify how earth-shaking the average play was, and by extension how exciting each game is. And by that metric, last night’s game comes out as the second-most thrilling in World Series history.

FiveThirtyEight

Did it really happen? Sweet mother of all that's pure and good, this insanity most definitely did happen, as the 43,000-something fans in attendance at Minute Maid Park will tell their kids and their grandkids and their neighbors and the woman in line at the grocery store and the co-worker at the office they haven't talked to in two years. Games like this bring us together. The entire city of Houston will be talking baseball on Monday morning.

ESPN

Words fail. Analogies go limp. A common refrain for a game like Game 5 of the 2017 World Series is that baseball is drunk. Baseball is not drunk. Drunk people don’t fall up the stairs, through a window, and explode upon contact with the moon. This is not a movie. Movies have plots, logical progressions from A to B. This is not an avant-garde movie, either, where the director was trying to be weird. Both the Dodgers and Astros really, really, really wanted to be normal, and they absolutely could not.

Game 2 of the 2017 World Series forced me to break out the hyperbole stick, and angry readers wrested it from my hands and beat me with it. It was somewhat deserved. But the hyperbole stick is in control now.

SBNation

 

Teaching autonomous cars about winter driving

Now, just in time for the first snowfall of the season, Waymo self-driving cars will hit Michigan roads for the winter. Building on the snowy work we’ve done to date, we’ll be giving our vehicles even more practice driving in snow, sleet and ice. This type of testing will give us the opportunity to assess the way our sensors perform in wet, cold conditions. And it will also build on the advanced driving skills we’ve developed over the last eight years by teaching our cars how to handle things like skidding on icy, unplowed roads.

John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo at Medium

Hailey Dawson’s first pitch

7-year-old Hailey Dawson brought the Houston crowd to its feet in last night’s Game 4 of the World Series. She threw the ceremonial first pitch.

SBNation writes

“Due to Poland Syndrome, Dawson only has three fingers on one hand. A team at UNLV Engineering built her a 3D-printed hand, so she can now throw a baseball as well as more easily do everyday tasks that would have otherwise been more difficult. She has a few different types of hands she can wear, including one dedicated to pitching completely.”

 

Sock innovation

Stance has become the go-to hosiery of Hollywood actors, hip-hop stars, pro athletes, skateboarders, motocrossers and now at least one global leader. The San Clemente, California, startup accomplished this by making socks that promise durability, arch support and clever designs—and by cultivating a roster of celebrity investors, who promote the brand to fans. One backer, Jay Z, name-dropped the brand in his 2013 single “F.U.T.W.”

Venture capitalists like the company, too. Pedigreed investors, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, August Capital, Shasta Ventures and others from Silicon Valley, have put $110 million in the sock business. “No one had thought about this category,” says Tod Francis, co-founder of Shasta Ventures. Trudeau, who attracted attention in May for a different pair of Star Wars socks made by Stance, is a fan but not an investor.

BusinessWeek

 

The new Southwest 737 MAX 8

Southwest is starting to roll out the latest version of the 737.

The Points Guy describes some of the innovations:

• Easily, the most notable change about the Southwest MAX experience is how quiet it is. Compared to its 737 predecessors, the MAX feels like you’re not even flying. It’s an incredible difference in passenger experience when there’s so little noise.
• On boarding and deplaning, Southwest now plays music on its MAX aircraft. From what I heard, there seems to be quite a variety — from more calming beats to today’s hits.
• The mood lighting is also a big change for the MAX. When boarding WN1, the inaugural flight, the mood lighting was set to a fluorescent blue and pink combination. While taxiing and upon arrival, flight attendants showed off a few other color combinations…
• One of the fundamental improvements of the MAX over its predecessors is how fuel efficient it is. The aircraft is operated by CFM International’s new LEAP-1B engines, which are both more efficient and quieter than previous engines. The carrier says the MAX aircraft could reduce fuel burn by as much as 14% compared with other 737 variants.The improved fuel efficiency and longer range could allow Southwest to expand its route networks to more destinations on long-haul routes.

 

A Digital Utility

This new agreement proposes that GE’s application development platform Predix* will become NYPA’s Industrial IoT platform of choice. It also intends for NYPA’s expanded use of software from GE to further enhance the efficiency and reliability of NYPA fossil and hydroelectric-fueled power generation assets. NYPA also intends to deploy Predix-based software to enable it to build a dashboard of the operating health of all its power plants and transmission assets at its Smart Operations Center (iSOC) in White Plains, N.Y.

In addition, as part of a competitive selection process, NYPA will explore intelligent environment technology from Current, powered by GE, to improve energy efficiency and digital productivity in public buildings and throughout its municipal customer base. Current’s CityIQ intelligent sensor nodes will be integrated into NYPA’s LED street lighting at several smart city demonstration projects across New York State. Also as part of the competitive selection process, NYPA will explore integrating Current’s new AllSites energy management software at its New York Energy Manager, an Albany-based headquarters that provides public and private facility operators across the state with timely data on energy use.

GE News

 

The birthplace of robots

More and more, it’s Fanuc’s industrial robots that assemble and paint automobiles in China, construct complex motors, and make injection-molded parts and electrical components. At pharmaceutical companies, Fanuc’s sorting robots categorize and package pills. At food-packaging facilities, they slice, squirt, and wrap edibles.

The $50 billion company that controls most of the world’s market for factory automation and industrial robotics. In fact, Fanuc might just be the single most important manufacturing company in the world right now, because everything Fanuc does is designed to make it part of what every other manufacturing company is doing.

BusinessWeek

video below of Fanuc’s Robodrill

 

Nadella’s “Learn-it-All” Curiosity

Since then, Nadella has not only restored Microsoft to relevance; he’s generated more than $250 billion in market value in just three and a half years—more value growth over that time than Uber and Airbnb, Netflix and Spotify, Snapchat and WeWork. Indeed, more than all of them combined. Only a handful of CEOs—names like Bezos, Cook, Zuckerberg—can boast similarly impressive results. Microsoft’s shares have not only returned to their dotcom-bubble highs but surpassed them. “[Nadella] has exceeded all my expectations,” says Morfit, now a member of Microsoft’s board. “I wish I could say we saw it all happening. That wouldn’t be honest.”

How Nadella turned things around comes back to the book he had his top lieutenants read, and the culture that took hold from there. He has inspired the company’s 124,000 employees to embrace what he calls “learn-it-all” curiosity (as opposed to what he describes as Microsoft’s historical know-it-all bent) that in turn has inspired developers and customers—and investors—to engage with the company in new, more modern ways. Nadella is a contemporary CEO able to emphasize the kinds of soft skills that are often derided in the cutthroat world of corporate politics but are, in today’s fast-moving marketplace, increasingly essential to outsize performance.

Fast Company

 

Plex and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

I first wrote about the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the 2013 book The Digital Enterprise. A collaboration with the CEO of Software AG, most of the examples profiled there were Germany based. At the same time, companies like GE were rolling out their vision of the Industrial Internet in the US and elsewhere. Today, it is far more mainstream and showing up as “Advanced Manufacturing” all over the world.

Plex does a very nice job capturing the excitement of this wave reshaping shop floors, logistics and customized products all over the world in their annual State of Manufacturing survey

“In review of the survey findings, there are a number of major factors that emerge as the foundation for the 4IR. Without question, cloud computing has been a universal accelerant for this innovation, supporting connected processes that extend across the shop floor and out into broader customer and supplier ecosystems. With cloud comes connectivity, enabling everything from tighter links across production ecosystems to better system, equipment, and end-product integration. Every day, new devices and equipment, both those designed specifically for manufacturing and those conceived for other industries or even consumer markets, are providing new opportunities for innovation and connection. From additive manufacturing (3D printing) to connected sensors and wearable devices, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is delivering new endpoints to enhance the ways we design, build, sell, and service products.”

Get yourself a copy. If you are only using cloud computing for your administrative functions and your IT infrastructure, you are missing out on the Revolution.