New Florence. New Renaissance.

The future of insurance

One of the most profitable in the world, the insurance industry exceeded $1.2 trillion in annual revenue since 2011 in the U.S. alone.

But risk is becoming predictable. And insurance is getting disrupted fast.

By 2025, we’ll be living in a trillion-sensor economy, projected to generate bronto-bytes (1000 trillion trillion) of data, as explained by TSensors Summit co-founder Janusz Bryzek. And as we enter a world where everything is measured all the time, we’ll start to transition from protecting against damages to preventing them in the first place.

But what happens to health insurance when Big Brother is always watching? Do rates go up when you sneak a cigarette? Do they go down when you eat your vegetables?

And what happens to auto insurance when most cars are autonomous? Or life insurance when the human lifespan doubles?

For that matter, what happens to insurance brokers when blockchain makes them irrelevant?

Read about in in Peter Diamandis’ blog post

Video below has another perspective on the industry

 

Fending off GPS spoofing

Vehicles that rely on GPS navigation are vulnerable to spoofing, the sending of phony signals to lead them off their intended course. The palm-size Pyramid GPS SP from Regulus Cyber Ltd. uses a bundle of antennas and receivers to make sure the signals it’s reading are legit.

Bloomberg

A road trip. From your couch.

Matthew Muspratt traveled 3,700 miles across the US, entirely in Google Street View. He clicked from West Quoddy Head, Maine, all the way to Ozette, Washington—a near-Odyssean journey through 16 states that he began while living in Kigali, Rwanda.

He stopped constantly, whether to search Wikipedia for clues about his surroundings or simply snap a photo—in the form of a screenshot. He captured scenes reflecting local color, like signs in Maine advertising corn or a vintage car winding through the green mountains of Vermont

Wired

Image from his regular posts about the trip on Medium

The beauty of hurricanes

I flew into the path of Hurricane Charley in 2004 to evacuate our dogs. We grudgingly evacuated last year to escape the wrath of Irma. I wrote a case study about The National Hurricane Center in The New Polymath. I visited the NHC in Miami earlier this year to get an update. I am in awe of hurricanes.

While folks in the Carolinas probably think I am nuts as they batten their hatches for the devastation Hurricane Florence portends, how can a blog which celebrates Florence not admire the beauty in its namesake and her friends Gordon, Helene and Isaac?

Hurricanes are all about data visualization and satellites, Hurricane Hunters, dropsondes, buoy sensors and countless other capture devices generate tons of data we can then admire in their vibrant colors and shapes.

The first 4 below are from the computers at NHC, 5 from Weather Underground, 6 from satellites courtesy of MarketWatch and 7 from a Hurricane Hunter courtesy of CNN

 

More cashier-less grocery stores

With it, San Francisco gets its first automated checkout market, which will expand up to nearly 500 square feet to become a full-sized cashier-free convenience store in the coming months, says Motukuri. Not only a first for San Francisco, Zippin–as far as we can tell–is the first Amazon Go rival to open to the public anywhere.

It’s far from the only competitor, though. Bay Area neighbors such as AiFi, Aipoly, and Standard Cognition and Israel’s Trigo Vision are all developing similar systems. They each use arrays of inexpensive cameras positioned overhead to track people and the products they pick up. The camera feeds are analyzed by algorithms trained through machine learning to recognize the appearance of each product the store carries.

FastCompany

Every MLB stadium in about a month

For Mike Mountain, just going to every stadium wasn’t enough. He wanted to do it in the minimum amount of time possible. So he built an app that helped him figure out the shortest route that would take him to all 30 ballparks and back to where he started. Utilizing Major League Baseball’s master schedule, the Google Maps API, and a free online supercomputer, he came up with the answer: 35 days, 30 stadiums.

This Saturday, Mountain, a software engineering lead, will go see the Mets take on the Yankees in the Bronx. And over the next 34 days, he’ll drive 16,000 miles before arriving at Baltimore’s Camden Yards for another Yankees game. During the trip he’s scheduled to see the Milwaukee Brewers the most times–five. He’ll see the Seattle Mariners, San Francisco Giants, and Baltimore Orioles four times. And he’ll see 13 teams just the one time at their own ballparks.

FastCompany

The Knowledge: London cab drivers in the age of GPS

For all that, you can thank the Knowledge, a 153-year-old system for memorizing every street and landmark in a six-mile area of central London. The Knowledge requires all cabbies to navigate between any two points in the city entirely from memory. Hopeful drivers study for three to fours years, traverse London on a motor scooter to learn the shortest routes across town and are required to pass a series of intense oral exams -- all before they can get behind the wheel of a taxi. It's a process unmatched anywhere in the world.

CNET.com

 

The digital shop floor

This was a great keynote led by Jerry Foster, CTO at Plex at last month’s user conference in Detroit. Customers, partners and technology from PTC, Daqri, Microsoft. RealWear, Google and others show how voice interfaces, drones, robots and wearables are changing the shop floor

Jerry spends the first nine minutes going through some of the innovations in Plex’s past then goes into some of the cool stuff they are playing with today.

 

The unsung heroes at the National Hurricane Center

I wrote a case study on the NHC in The New Polymath in 2010. There was much to admire:

“They reach out to a wide range of data sources in hostile circumstances. They apply multiple, conflicting models to the data. They present the data in multiple formats depending on the sophistication of the audience. And they keep improving their forecasts year on year.”

I had a chance to visit the Miami center last week to get an update. It was good to see the “platforms” for data capture continue to expand and modernize. For example, the GOES-16, which went live last year is the first of 4 next-gen geostationary satellites planned. (click on images to enlarge)

It was good to see their track forecast accuracy continue to improve

It was good to see their “products” evolve – such as a new forecast for the time when it is too late to be making preparations for a tropical storm or hurricane outside.

But it was especially nice to meet the brave, smart folks at the center

Here is Warren Madden, a meteorologist in the CARCAH unit (Chief, Aerial Reconnaissance Coordination, All Hurricanes). He has flown over 1000 hours including missions into Hurricanes Rita, Ivan, Wilma and Floyd. He talked about the planes the Hurricane Hunters fly into storms including the WP-3D Orion and the G-IV Gulfstream. He explained the role of dropsondes - temperature, pressure and humidity sensors, low powered telemetry transmitter, GPS receiver and battery in a cardboard tube with a parachute. They drop several of these sondes during each sortie. As the sonde descends the GPS receiver tracks the position and velocity and allows for deduction of wind speed and direction in the storm.

Jack Beven, Senior Hurricane Specialist. who signs off on many storm advisories like one during Hurricane Irma last year, told us about the role of satellites and supercomputers in the forecasting process.

Phil Manougian was our tour guide and chockful of information and trivia. He is a NOAA Commissioned Corps Officer. Did you know that is one of 7 Federal Uniformed Services? (others are Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Public Health Service)

Dennis Feltgen, the Communications and Public Affairs Officer, was our host. I was impressed by how much complex science and technology at use at the NHC has to be distilled for the benefit of the lay person, under extreme stress of an approaching hurricane. Also made me appreciate how tough it must be to protect his colleagues from the media rush while they are trying to analyze the mountains of data,  often of multiple storms approaching simultaneously. 

We also met other colleagues in the Tropical Analysis & Forecast Branch which produces marine forecasts for an  an area which covers 14,000,000 square nautical miles and the National Weather Service branch co-located there which produces warnings and forecasts for South Florida and the adjacent waters. 

Can machines replace these brave souls? I asked Madden about drones, and he explained their battery life and payload capacity at this point is still pretty limited. I asked Beven about machine learning and while computers are indispensable at the NHC, they still need plenty of human interpretation. 

As I wrote in Polymath "While most of the attention goes to hurricanes when they make landfall and cause chaos, this team’s contribution is even more valuable in reducing the “false positives” – not needing to evacuate areas unless absolutely necessary."  

I left very proud of these humble, geeky public servants!

Pushing UX, drone and other frontiers

Samsung’s latest patent is for a drone with an integrated display that’s able to detect the face and pupils of a person as well as their hand gestures and position. The patent shows a unit that features a display at the center with four propellers on each corner.

The patent describes a drone that can include a camera and observation system to transmit information to the main control unit. The system can track the users’ eyes, head, hands, or fingers in real time. The drone’s flight speed and direction can be controlled by moving your head, eyes, or hands, and the unit can also automatically track users without any additional gestures.

The Verge

Photo Credit