New Florence. New Renaissance.

AI and accountants

AI is helping accountants improve the accuracy and quality of transactional data right at the data creation stage by deriving intelligence from historical, even client-specific data. At the same time, this “transactional judgment/decision-making” help that AI gives to the accountants while processing accounting transactions is also speeding up the transactional work to the levels of efficiency not seen before. These factors alone are directly helping accounting firms grow both the top-line and the bottom-line, by being able to serve more clients within existing resources as well as reducing the cost per unit of work produced by the firm.

AI is moving the audit process from hindsight, in looking at the rear-view mirror of the past year, to providing operational insight and offering foresight of the operations in the near future.

AI will not replace accountants and auditors, but accountants and auditors that use AI can replace those that don’t

CPA Trendlines

Now these are excellent listeners

Harman develops premium audio systems for 25 automakers under nine brand names. To ensure each sounds both excellent and brand-unique, the company has trained 100 expert listeners in five countries. Each must pass a hearing test and demonstrate an ability to identify variations in seven bands of audio (such as on an equalizer). That's spectral analysis. Spatial performance is a system's ability to place each instrument or vocal input on a soundstage. Dynamics is about clarity at varying volume levels. Integrity has to do with buzzing, squeaks, and rattles in the system installation. Experts assess these four attributes as they listen to seven audio tracks per car on 200 cars per year, comparing each against 400 reference cars.

Motor Trend

Dashboard hologram

EyeLights’ Eyedrive smart device, that allows a driver to see GPS directions, music playlists and incoming calls through a hologram that appears on the car’s window. A tablet-like device sits on the car’s dashboard, and, once connected to the phone’s GPS and music apps, will project the directions or music track onto the windshield — large enough that everyone in the car can see it. Since it’s activated by voice or gestures, the driver never has to look away from the road.

New York Times

 

An unintended consequence of autonomous vehicles?

"Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have no need to park close to their destination, or even to park at all. Instead, AVs can seek out free on-street parking, return home, or cruise (circle around). Because cruising is less costly at lower speeds, a game theoretic framework shows that AVs also have the incentive to implicitly coordinate with each other in order to generate congestion. Using a traffic microsimulation model and data from downtown San Francisco, this paper suggests that AVs could more than double vehicle travel to, from and within dense, urban cores. New vehicle trips are generated by a 90% reduction in effective parking costs, while existing trips become longer because of driving to more distant parking spaces and cruising. One potential policy response—subsidized peripheral parking—would likely exacerbate congestion through further reducing the cost of driving. Instead, this paper argues that the rise of AVs provides the opportunity and the imperative to implement congestion pricing in urban centers. Because the ability of AVs to cruise blurs the boundary between parking and travel, congestion pricing programs should include two complementary prices—a time-based charge for occupying the public right-of-way, whether parked or in motion, and a distance- or energy-based charge that internalizes other externalities from driving."

Summary of a paper by Prof. Adam Millard-Ball at the U.of California, Santa Cruz at 

ScienceDirect

 

Super Sabbaticals

The cost for the trip was well into the seven figures, but who can put a price on personal transformation? It’s no coincidence that hard-charging career entrepreneurs, financiers, and other one-percenters, unaccustomed to half-measures at work or play, are seeking a maxed-out full-throttle gap year—call it a super sabbatical—to jump-start the kind of high-wattage mind-expanding, soul-sustaining experiences they missed out on while they were raising their next round and ricocheting between Silicon Valley, Dubai, and New York.

Conde Nast Traveler

14 Minutes from Earth

Alan Eustace holds a daredevil-ish world record: In 2014, at age 57, he performed the highest human free-fall ever.

Eustace, at the time a chief Google engineer and pilot, plunged 25 miles from the stratosphere down to Earth. From that height — in the area between the Earth and space — you can glimpse the curvature of the planet. Eustace wore just a spacesuit and helmet during his endeavor, though he deployed a life-saving parachute for the final 10,000 feet.

A 2016 documentary about Eustace's journey, "14 Minutes from Earth," premiered this month on Netflix from Atomic Entertainment. It reveals how Eustace turned stratospheric skydiving into an engineering project, developing a new space suit, assembling a team of balloon-makers, and performing test runs.

Insider

 

Movies about developers

Quick, which is your favorite movie featuring developers? Other than this one involving Steve Ballmer ...

Stacey Fish and Craig Cmehil of SAP, Jon Reed of Diginomica and I were recently at BYU kicking off a hackathon where the students blended HR datasets extracted from SuccessFactors and employee survey data from Qualtrics.

As much fun was the drive from Salt Lake City to Provo. Quite of bit covered anecdotes which have to be preceded with "I could tell you, but then I would have to....". But we did talk quite a bit about changing developer communities around the world - open source, IoT in Germany, ML in China and many others

The conversation then turned to movies about geeks and developers. Here is a list of movies we came up with - in no particular order

• Hackers
• Sneakers
• Pump up the Volume
• Revenge of the Nerds
• War Games
• Tron
• The Net
• Misfits (tv show from the 80's)
• Real Genius
• Unfriended 

The comments were pretty philosophical - the movies focused on the triumph of the misfits, what society rejects becomes the source of your redemption, they mock the empty values of the beautiful people who don't get code. These movies in past taught: ethics, societal responsibility... today's highlight cool apps, the Uber-type startup geeks.

It truly was an enjoyable afternoon and evening set in the beautiful Wasatch scenery

Readers, what are some other geeky movies and shows that you would add to the list?

 

Those magnificent men and their road paving machines

When I was very young, my Dad had taken me to see The Magnificent Flying Machines. I used to butcher the theme song, but Googled for it so I could hum it half-way decently. You see it was a rare week I was in town, and our City was repaving our neighborhood. So, I had a chance over a few days to talk to the workers about their machines.

Most of us don't have good feelings about workers who pave highways - they slow traffic to a crawl, most always seem to be standing around etc. After my recent conversations, I have new found respect for them.

The milling truck, the Roadtecc RX-700e in our case, was by far the most fascinating. It chews up the old asphalt and feeds it to a truck ahead which takes the rocks to be recycled. Its teeth have to be constantly cooled and a water truck usually follows to pipe in the coolant. They have to take elaborate measures to have the truck work around manhole covers.

This is what our cul de sac looked like after the Roadtec went around stripping it

The recycled asphalt, milled further at the Ajax Repaving (the contractor) factory and fortified with additives, was then applied by the Volvo PF4410 

The Cat 299D XHP was the busy body feeding the Volvo and helping during the clean up of the debris. It took them about an hour to repave our cul de sac, even with its awkward shape.

The Sakai compactors are fascinating in their own way. They look dumb and heavy but lots of science has gone into ensuring their vibratory and oscillating rollers rearrange the material particles for a really dense fit.

Finally, there was plenty of cleaning equipment like the Elgin Broom Badger

What we did not get to see was highway equipment that mark lanes and punch in the Botts' dots that provide tactile and auditory feedback to drivers as they switch lanes.  

Fascinating what they got done over a few hours. Shadow, the neighborhood cat, was initially annoyed with all the noise and chaos but then he admired our new cul de sac and the efficiency of the workers.

BTW, on our community Facebook page, I saw rave reviews about the workers

"One of the workers found a dear elderly neighbor with dementia lost and hanging onto a tree in the heat. He wouldn’t leave her side. She didn’t know where she was, etc. The worker stopped our mailman and they came to my house. I went outside and the worker was the sweetest man. I have known this neighbor for years and did not know she recently developed dementia. I was able to get her home and inside safely. This worker was a hero. I’ve never seen anyone so patient and so loving to a complete stranger."

another said

"They all came to our lemonade stand, paid more than the price, smiled, and were so friendly!!!"

Next time you drive by a construction zone, wave at these workers. It is actually impressive what they get done while it may look they are just standing around. 

The Boeing MAX MCAS system

Much in the news these days. From The Air Current

When Boeing set out to develop the 737 Max engineers had to find a way to fit a much larger and more- fuel efficient engine under the wing of the single—aisle jet’s notoriously low—riding landing gear. By moving the engine slightly forward and higher up and extending the nose landing gear by eight inches, Boeing eked another 14% improvement in fuel consumption out of the continually tweaked airliner.

That changed. ever so slightly, how the jet handled in certain situations. The relocated engines and their refined nacelle shapel caused an upward pitching moment — in essence, the Max’s nose was getting nudged skyward. Boeing quietly added a new system to compensate for some unique aircraft handling characteristics.

The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) was designed to address this..it is “activated without pilot input” and “commands nose down stabilizer to enhance pitch characteristics during step turns with elevated load factors and during flaps up flight at airspeeds approaching stall.”

The system activates when the sensed Angle of Attack (AOA) ‘exceeds a threshold based on airspeed and altitude. That tilts the 737 Max’s horizontal stabilizer upward at a rate of .27 degrees per second for a total travel of 2.5 degrees in just under 10 seconds. How much the stabilizer moves depends on Mach number. At higher Mach the stabilizer moves less, at slower speeds it moves more. The trim system under MCAS is not stopped by simply moving the control yoke.

If the Max is at a high A0A — or its sensors erroneously believe that it is — the MCAS function commands another incremental stabilizer nose down command. The system can be deactivated if pilots trim the aircraft manually to override the MCAS’s attempt to automatically pitch the jet’s nose down.

Boeing, however, did not widely disclose the MCAS. According to the Wall Street Journal 

“One high- ranking Boeing official said the company had decided against disclosing more details to cockpit crews due to concerns about inundating average pilots with too much information — and significantly more technical data — than they needed or could digest.’

While the investigations are still on going, it appears pilot confusion or lack of knowledge about the manual trim may be one of the causes of the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.

 

 

Apps for freelancers

But which apps should you have in the first place? Zapier, which integrates with more than 1,000 of them, crunched the numbers for Entrepreneur to find the ones giggers used the most in 2018. Not surprisingly, the biggies, like Google Docs, Slack, and Zoom, all rose to the top. But here are the top five lesser-known apps -- ones that are surging in usage and, says Foster, easy to use.

Entrepreneur

They include Airtable, Paperform, Wave (in vid below), Clickup and Proposify