Vantablack BMW, EV Charger Incompatibility, Unemployment Leads to Low Birth Weight
The newsletter will be on a break next week as much of our community gathers in Washington, DC, for our Blockchain and Other Networks conference. TTI/V members who have to miss the meeting can follow along via livestream, or catch all of the talks via video or recap via Nancy Kleinrock’s Highlights and Reinforcements; the videos and summary documents will be available post-conference in our members-only archive. For help with the livestream links or your User ID or password, please connect with cmiklas@ttivanguard.com.
Genetics, geology, and archaeology all agree that the earliest human beings in North America arrived by sea and river to a place in Idaho now known as Cooper’s Ferry about 16,000 years ago, dramatically predating the Clovis people, who came about 3,000 years later. (Dave Hughes, London, Jul 2014; Anthony Shelton, Vancouver, Oct 2010)
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/first-people-americas-came-sea-ancient-tools-unearthed-idaho-river-suggest
Sussing out an adversary nation’s spycraft usually requires top-notch investigative nuance, creativity, and skill, as Eric Haseltine will make plain in his talk next week; other times, the President tweets out an image that quickly permits amateur satellite trackers to draw a quick conclusion about just which of the nation’s most advanced satellites captured the photo: satellite USA 224, which features Earth-facing Hubble-quality image capture.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/02/756673481/amateurs-identify-u-s-spy-satellite-behind-president-trumps-tweet
Did you give Facebook your phone number? Big mistake. (Roger McNamee and Jonathan Taplin, Los Angeles, Mar 2018; Christopher White, Philadelphia, Jul 2015; Sean Parker, San Francisco, Feb 2010)
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/04/facebook-phone-numbers-exposed/
TTI/V member BMW has painted a car using the world’s darkest shade of black. “The pigment uses tiny carbon nanotubes to absorb up to 99.965% of light striking its surface.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90396527/the-first-car-painted-with-the-worlds-blackest-black-is-deeply-unsettling
Join us in Toronto on October 10 for a TTI/Vanguard regional event, “Cognitive Computing and the Intelligent Enterprise” (details and registration), with Stephen DeAngelis of member firm Enterra.
Remember the pre-web era of Compuserve, AOL, GEnie, MCI Mail, and dial-up modems? Everything was incompatible, and there was a desperate need for greater speeds. Now fast-forward 30 years: The good news: Porsche’s new EV stations can recharge a battery in just 15 minutes. The bad news: The charging world is rife with incompatible standards “each having its own operating voltages and currents, physical connectors, control logic, and communication protocols between car and charger.” (Danny Kim, San Francisco, Dec 2013; Amory Lovins, Washington, D.C., Oct 2011; Serge Roy, Montreal, Apr 2004)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/efficiency/porsche-claims-it-can-double-teslas-fastcharging-rate
Quick Hits
Carbon nanotube microprocessors are coming of age. (Qing Cao, San Francisco, Dec 2016; Subhasish Mitra, San Francisco, Dec 2015)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/processors/modern-microprocessor-built-using-carbon-nanotubes
More than half of all Google searches don’t lead to a click—presumably because Google often shows partial answers on the results page. (Claudia Perlich, San Francisco, Feb 2017; Will Scully-Power, San Francisco, Dec 2014; Bob Garfield, Atlanta, Feb 2014)
https://www.modernretail.co/platforms/retailers-are-rethinking-their-google-search-strategies/
It’s a commonplace by now that big data can uncover unexpected correlations, but we were still blown away by a study that found that a 1% increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 1.3% increase in the incidence of low birth weight babies.
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/12568/does-unemployment-worsen-babies-health-a-tale-of-siblings-maternal-behaviour-and-selection
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"If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you."
—Gen. (Ret.) Jim Mattis