The world’s largest coal port in Australia is set to be powered by entirely renewable energy. The announcement is part of the Port of Newcastle’s targets of decarbonising by 2040 and having coal only make up half of its revenue by the end of this decade.
The port has also made the change following coal power generation hitting its lowest level in the Australian electricity market at the tail end of last year. A power purchase agreement (PPA) has been signed with Iberdrola to generate the wind power needed for the port’s operations.
I had profiled Facebook’s Prineville, OR data center in a case study in a 2012 book. It was very innovative for its time – see an excerpt here
A decade later, Meta is planning a massive new facility in Europe as Ars Technica describes
“Amsterdam is home to a major Internet exchange, which distributes traffic from data centers nearby, and it has attracted tech giants looking for better connectivity and fiber to set up giant, "hyperscale" data centers to process their own data nearby.
Microsoft built the first hyperscale in the Netherlands in 2015. Since then, two more have been built, and that number is expected to grow, according to trade group the Dutch Data Center Association. But Meta's plan for the Zeewolde site, known as Tractor Field 4, is by far the biggest yet. It would span 166 hectares, the equivalent of more than 1,300 Olympic swimming pools, and would devour 1,380 gigawatt-hours of energy a year, at least double what the municipality's 22,000 residents consume in the same period.”
The video below is in Dutch but gives you a glimpse at the location, the dimensions and the concerns of the local residents
In the space between satellites, DARPA wants there to be a shared language. The Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node (Space-BACN) is a program designed to place satellites that can talk to other satellites in orbit, overcoming existing design barriers and adapting to the future. It’s the promise of robust infrastructure in space, capable of routing signals around damaged satellites.
“In simpler terms, the goal of this program is to eliminate stovepipes and ‘connect space,’ which will in turn enable the joint all-domain fight.”
“Joint all-domain fight” is Pentagon-speak for across all branches, and in land, air, space, and anywhere else the military might fight. Getting there means first breaking communications free of stovepiping.
As Mary J Blige says "Don't need no hateration holleration"
Instead, we will experience a relentless flood of innovative technologies at the Big Game this Sunday.
The Stadium
“The 3.1 million-square-foot behemoth in Inglewood is a state-of-the-art technological marvel, featuring a 70,000-square-foot video board (dubbed the “Infinity Screen”), lightning-fast Wi-Fi and a massive LED canopy. SoFi Stadium relies solely on digital displays for everything from advertising to concession stand menus; that also comes in handy since the arena has two NFL tenants, the Rams and the Chargers, and can easily rotate their branding according to who’s playing that day.
With a whopping $5.5 billion price tag, the stadium’s top brass has visions that go far beyond the Super Bowl. The facility is also a concert venue that will host the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bad Bunny this year, and it will play a feature role in the 2028 Summer Olympics in L.A.”
The video tour below provides more of a perspective
The Broadcast
“Few live sports broadcasts compare with the NFL’s season finale when it comes to total cameras and equipment. However, (NBC’s) Gaudelli emphasizes that additional camera angles will be focused on capturing key situational moments rather than adding more cameras for the sake of adding more cameras. So the bulk of the additions for Super Bowl LVI will be goal-line cameras, cameras shooting down the sidelines, and camera shooting down the end-line in the end zone.
NBC will also debut a new graphics package for the game, upping the ante on AR and virtual elements in the broadcast. For the first time, NBC will have virtual graphics available via a Steadicam on the field and also plans to use SoFi Stadium’s Infinity Screen LED halo scoreboard above the field as a graphic display for some of the virtual graphics in the broadcast.”
“VR and AR experiences have been available for the Super Bowl for a few years now, with FOX Sports broadcasting Super Bowl LI Highlights in near real-time in 2017. Five years later, VR and AR have immensely progressed, with the entire game being able to be streamed in VR on apps like Bigscreen. Bigscreen is a VR app designed to let you watch content with friends in the metaverse.
The NFL has also partnered with Meta to allow fans to decorate their online 3D avatars with virtual NFL merchandise. According to officials from Meta, these 3D, customizable avatars show that the metaverse represents VR and AR, but also more familiar digital platforms like your phone and computer. Small changes like a 3D avatar across all platforms could be a key entry point for people stepping into the metaverse.
In another step in modernizing the Super Bowl, the NFL is offering each attendee of Super Bowl LVI a personalized non-fungible token (NFT) ticket that is customized with their seat number. As of now, the Super Bowl NFTs will be considered collectors’ items. The NFL could also use the ticket NFTs for future experiences and activations.”
Games this season have already been able to take advantage of ML driven recommendations and hopefully the Super Bowl will be close enough to require early and often the Next Gen Stats Decision Guide which “is built on a series of machine-learning models using the Amazon SageMaker platform powering live fourth-down and two-point-conversion decision analytics. For every crucial decision, Next Gen Stats breaks down the numbers in real time. To create a quantitative tool that can aid in live decision support, we first have to break down the driving factors of the decision: win probability (the impact of each decision on the game) and conversion probability (the likelihood of success with each decision).”
Security will be massive as the video below describes
The Ventilation
The stadium’s passive ventilation and daylighting strategies — both defining features of its indoor/outdoor atmosphere — capitalize on the sun’s position and ocean winds throughout the day, resulting in a series of small microclimates on the site that informed landscape planning.
This may be a challenge with temperatures expected to be in the 80s. While the stadium has natural ventilation with its roof with open sides, the temperature inside will likely be higher in a packed stadium
The Half-time show
The acoustics, the lighting and fireworks will be electric – here is a preview
The Commercials
Now for the best part of the game. The price for a 30 second spot is nearly $7 million, yet NBC is sold out of inventory. Lots of technology vendors will be represented.
In fact, it is being called the Crypto Bowl, because as at least 5 of those startups will be featured in Super Bowl commercials. But you also have enterprise vendors like Salesforce with this
My early favorite for best commercial from the Game involves robots. Ok, it also involves beer :)
The whole place should be rocking with Mary J
"Let's get it crunk up on Have fun up on, up in this dancery...."
NASA, for decades, has led the effort to study sonic booms, the loudness of which are considered the key barrier to enabling a future for overland, commercial supersonic aircraft. That future will be closer to reality when the agency’s X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) airplane takes to those familiar skies in 2022, taking the first steps to demonstrating the ability to fly at supersonic speeds while reducing the sonic boom to a significantly quieter sonic thump.
While NASA will fly the X-59 over communities around the U.S. as early as 2024 to analyze the public’s perception and acceptability of quiet supersonic flight, the agency will first need to prove that the X-plane is as quiet as it’s designed to be.
To do this, NASA will measure the sound of the sonic thumps in the Mojave Desert using cutting edge technology – a brand new, state-of-the-art ground recording system for a brand new, state-of-the-art X-plane.
In keeping with China’s status as a global leader in technological innovation, the opening ceremony made up for its relatively low number of participants with an extraordinary spectacle created by an array of lasers, lights, enormous LED screens, and pyrotechnics. Despite the use of plenty of cutting-edge technology, however, the ceremony’s imagery was largely inspired by the natural world, with the narrative centered around the beginning of spring and featuring recreations of a variety of Chinese flora and fauna, including willow trees and butterflies. The most spectacular moment? The light sticks paraded by dancers that unfolded to create dandelions, before fireworks exploded above to represent the seeds of the flower spreading across the earth.
While director Zhang Yimou may be best known for the kaleidoscopic cinematography, lavish costuming, and eye-popping sets of his wuxia martial-arts epics Hero and House of Flying Daggers, the three-time Oscar-nominated director’s themes of resilience and national pride made him the obvious choice to direct the opening ceremony at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, widely remembered as one of the most dazzling of all time. So it followed that he was enlisted to direct this year’s proceedings too—and he once again realized his distinctive vision with the ravishing visual splendor that has become his signature.
Here is a summary of some of the tech used for the ceremony
More recently, visitors to many zoos and aquariums see animals in surroundings that resemble their native habitat, behaving in ways that are typical for their species. What has changed?
In the intervening years, the professional zoo and aquarium community has fundamentally altered the way it views the task of caring for the animals in its collections. Instead of focusing on animal care, the industry is now requiring that zoos meet a higher standard – animal welfare. This is a new metric, and it represents a huge change in how zoos and aquariums qualify for accreditation.
From a guest column in The Conversation by director of the program in Zoo & Conservation Science at Drake University
Video below about AZA, The Association of Zoos and Aquariums
But the 2022 Games will take it one step further: None of the snow will be real. At both the alpine skiing venue in Yanqing, a mountainous Beijing suburb, and at the biathlon, cross-country, freestyle, nordic, ski jumping and snowboarding venues in Zhangjiakou, a ski destination 100 miles northwest of the host city, the temperatures regularly dip below freezing, but natural monthly snowfall is best measured in centimeters. “The Olympics cannot rely on that,” says Michael Mayr. “So they have to be sure the snow is there when they start.”
Here the onus falls to TechnoAlpin, an Italian snowmaking supplier for whom Mayr, 46, works as an area sales manager overseeing China. To hear him describe the vast amount of equipment necessary to stage these Olympics, TechnoAlpin might as well be outfitting an arctic army for battle. At the Yanqing venue alone, 170 fan-powered guns and 30 fanless stick lances work around the clock spraying water mist—sourced from a nearby reservoir and pressurized through multiple “pump stations”—that crystallizes into snow on its descent through the chilly air.
I had a chance to attend the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2013. Michael Lewis was on stage talking about his book, Moneyball. Billy Beane (who was played by Brad Pitt in the movie) was signing baseballs. Mark Cuban was walking around, friendly to everybody. We were all marveling how nicely sports analytics had matured since the book has been written a decade prior.
We have come so far in the 9 years since. I was listening to Mike Florio of Pro Football Focus (PFF) on the Dan Patrick radio show today and he was explaining their NFL grading system evaluates every player on every play during every football game. That’s just data for one league for one sport from one set of analysts.
This year's MIT Sloan event starts tomorrow – agenda here – and you can see from the titles of some of the academic papers being presented the video and numeric data being collected and being analyzed using ML and analysts across all sports
Extracting Professional Goalkeeper Technique from Broadcast Footage
Call to the Pen: Maximizing pitcher effectiveness via topic modeled cluster centroid distances
A Game-theoretic Approach to the Football Endgame: When Should the "2-Minute Drill" Begin?
Using Hex Maps to Classify & Cluster Dribble Hand-off Variants in the NBA
The video below from last year’s conference covers a session on digitization and innovation in sports even during the pandemic lockdowns
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