smart transportation

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pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Despite all this, I didn’t entirely trust that I’d discovered anything useful about the future of transportation. I knew I felt good about walking and biking. But I also knew that I was supposed to feel good. Much of what I read now professionally is pro-cycling and pro-walking, sometimes embarrassingly so. Some of the most frequently published writers on the subject of smart transportation are practically messianic, and heresy, such as suggesting that privately owned automobiles might have any place at all in some ideal future transportation infrastructure, is severely punished. Support for cyclists and pedestrians was in tune with my political sympathies, my social contacts, and even my bank account, since my company is frequently hired by clients interested in transforming the world into a less automobile-centric place.

As the political prediction machine Nate Silver of 538.com tweeted in 2012, “If a place has sidewalks, it votes Democratic.” It’s not totally obvious whether people vote a certain way because of where they live, or whether they move to places where everyone votes the way they do. What is obvious though is that all the elements of a Street Smart transportation system depend on density. At first glance, this would appear to be a giant advantage for a Street Smart future, since every demographic indicator shows that America and the world are headed for a much more urbanized future. Between 1970 and 2000, the world’s urban areas grew by about 22,300 square miles, but in the three decades between 2000 and 2030, they are expected to grow by 590,000 square miles, and house nearly one-and-a-half billion more people than today.

However, the exceptions to this rule are the really interesting ones. Two of the biggest cities that voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election were Salt Lake City and Oklahoma City. Despite that, as we’ve seen, both cities recognize the critical importance of building the elements of a Street Smart transportation system, from walkable downtowns to multimodal grids. Ideologically driven politicians and think tanks can fulminate all they want about the creeping dangers of European-style urbanism in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But mayors and city managers all over the country, whatever their political affiliations, can’t afford to see transportation policies in those terms.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

Tools like decision infrastructure for collaborative operational planning (DICOP), developed by DARPA, use causal models and influence diagram graphics to graphically show how various assumptions and resources affect planning. Visualisations and simulations utilising 3D models allow city managers and planners to understand complex relationships and conduct “what if” explorations such as, “What if we deleted new parking structures and put in public transit instead?” Smart Transportation Systems One of the most dramatic paybacks from investment in smart city technologies can be the reduction of time spent in cars, with resultant frustration, costs and CO2 emissions. Intelligent traffic management systems can manage signal lights, detours and traffic flows. Holland has implemented such a system, called TrafficLink, for its Amsterdam Smart City (ASC).

Since its implementation, the system has reduced vehicle loss hours in Amsterdam by 10 per cent. Figure 11.2: Amsterdam’s TrafficLink system (Credit: Rijkswaterstaat Verkeerscentrale) In Melbourne, Australia, the use of boom gates at railway crossings is an example of existing infrastructure that dramatically limits the ability of a city to implement smart transportation. At some crossings in the city, boom gates obstruct primary arterial feeder roads 70 to 80 per cent of the time during peak hours, adding a collective 16 to 20 hours of driving time each day to commuters. It has been estimated that removing such obstructions would return AUD$6 for every AUD$1 of investment in improvements in road infrastructure.

As buses and trains will be driven by AIs, they will be able to work longer hours without fatigue and overtime consideration. Autonomous, electric transportation systems and vehicles will also be much cheaper to maintain and operate. The costs of the driver will have been eliminated, and electric motors will require far less maintenance than typical combustion engines and the associated drivetrain. Smart transportation networks in large urban centres will work like a living organism. Small autonomous carts and pods will drive around campuses and shopping areas feeding people to ridesharing locations or public transport stations. Public transportation will be optimised around demand, events, weather and other considerations, all reactive in real time and dispatched by AI controllers.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Another system, Didi’s so-called Traffic Brain, integrates data from roads and maps, analyzes it, and then controls traffic within cities by timing traffic signals and adjusting reversible lanes. Didi has launched these smart-transport technologies in 20 Chinese cities to help control traffic flow and ease congestion. What else does this transport brainpower do? Didi has developed a global R&D network of big data and intelligent-driving technologies and opened a research lab in Mountain View and an AI lab in Beijing. The Chinese company also has formed innovation partnerships with Stanford University and the University of Michigan to accelerate development of smart transport. Didi vs. Uber It’s interesting to compare and contrast Didi in China with Uber in the United States.

The three Chinese high-tech titans are each pursuing investments beyond national borders and original business sectors. Let’s look at the strategies of each of these titans, in order of their place in the BAT league. Buffing Up Baidu Baidu is betting its future squarely on diversifying beyond search and into artificial intelligence technologies for self-driving, smart transport and voice-assisted smart home devices. In a major restructuring of its China business a few years ago, Baidu ditched several costly peripheral, cash-burning online businesses in food delivery services, mobile games, online travel, web shopping, and health care that were losing a battle with hard-charging Tencent and Alibaba.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

Experiences during Covid-19 are even tougher and more complex: see I. Eskytė, A. Lawson, M. Orchard and E. Andrews. 2020. Out on the streets – crisis, opportunity and disabled people in the era of Covid-19: reflections from the UK. Alter 14(4), 329–336. 15 L. Laker. 2020. The way we design transport is not equal. Smart Transport 6(May), 58–63 (https://smarttransportpub.blob.core.windows.net/web/1/root/insight-inclusivity-ongoing-series-physical-disability-laura-laker-low-res-pdf.pdf). 16 L. Sloman, S. Cairns, A. Green, L. Hopkinson and F. Perrotta. 2019. CWIS Active Travel Investment Models: model structure and evidence base.

In practice, though, we tend to use all this information to decide where and when to travel, not simply to purchase a ticket that matches a list of already defined criteria. When websites include a button that expands a search to show the cheapest days and times to travel, this has a large effect on the behaviour of the most price-sensitive customers. A smart transport provider could adapt the way options are presented to us to make the most of the way we make trade offs between our preferences. * * * 1 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. 2009. PESTLE analysis history and application. CIPD website, 21 October (www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/corpstrtgy/general/pestle-analysis.html). 2 Rail Delivery Group. 2019.

Street Blog Chicago, 23 June (https://chi.streetsblog.org/2018/06/06/oboi-reed-transportation-planning-needs-to-become-less-stale-pale-and-male/). 10 Aviation Job Search. 2020. Occupational gender differences in the aviation industry. Industry News blog, 17 February (https://blog.aviationjobsearch.com/occupational-gender-differences-in-the-aviation-industry/). 11 L. Laker. 2020. Diversity in transport needs to accelerate. Smart Transport Magazine, issue 7 (August), pp. 39–43 (https://bit.ly/3w4X7AT). 12 J. De Henau and S. Himmelweit. 2021. A care-led recovery from COVID-19: investing in high-quality care to stimulate and rebalance the economy. Feminist Economics 27(1–2), 453–469. 13 Department for Transport. 2020.


pages: 761 words: 80,914

Ansible: Up and Running: Automating Configuration Management and Deployment the Easy Way by Lorin Hochstein

Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, continuous integration, Debian, DevOps, domain-specific language, don't repeat yourself, general-purpose programming language, Infrastructure as a Service, job automation, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pull request, side project, smart transportation, web application

ansible_connection Ansible supports multiple transports, which are mechanisms that Ansible uses to connect to the host. The default transport, smart, will check to see if the locally installed SSH client supports a feature called ControlPersist. If the SSH client supports ControlPersist, Ansible will use the local SSH client. If the SSH client doesn’t support ControlPersist, then the smart transport will fall back to using a Python-based SSH client library called paramiko. ansible_shell_type Ansible works by making SSH connections to remote machines and then invoking scripts. By default, Ansible assumes that the remote shell is the Bourne shell located at /bin/sh, and will generate the appropriate command-line parameters that work with Bourne shell.

scalability, Ansible Scales Down scaling down, Ansible Scales Down scp_if_ssh connection, Default Settings script modules, Running Custom Python Scripts in the Context of the Application, Using the Script Module Instead of Writing Your Own secret variables, Variables and Secret Variables-Variables and Secret Variables security group rule parameters, Security Groupscidr_ip, Security Groups from_port, Security Groups proto, Security Groups to_port, Security Groups security groups, Auto-Generated Groups, Security Groups, Security Group Ports sensitive data, encrypting, Encrypting Sensitive Data with Vault-Encrypting Sensitive Data with Vault sequences, Lists serial clause, Running on One Host at a Time server(s)custom modules for checking reachability of, Example: Checking That We Can Reach a Remote Server for testing, Setting Up a Server for Testing-Simplifying with the ansible.cfg File inventory of, Inventory: Describing Your Servers-group_by viewing all facts associated with, Viewing All Facts Associated with a Server waiting for, in EC2, Waiting for the Server to Come Up server_name variable, Generating the Nginx Configuration Template service, Supervisor: The Process Manager service configuration files, Setting Service Configuration Files service discovery mechanism, Mezzanine service module, Modules setup module, Viewing a Subset of Facts set_fact, Using set_fact to Define a New Variable set_fs_attributes_if_different method, add_file_common_args shell module, Registering Variables, Custom Modules shorthand input, Bash modules, Implementing the Module in Bash simplejson library, Nothing to Install on the Remote Hosts size return value, The Assert Module smart transport, ansible_connection SoftLayer, Setting Up a Server for Testing, Amazon EC2 software, development mode vs. production mode, Why Deploying to Production Is Complicated-Supervisor: The Process Manager SQL databases, Introduction SSHagent forwarding, Agent Forwarding-Sudo and Agent Forwarding debugging, Debugging SSH Issues features of, SSH-Host Keys host keys, Host Keys-Host Keys native, Native SSH ssh-agent, SSH Agent-Linux, Mac OS X SSH key pairs, EC2 Key Pairs SSH multiplexing, SSH Multiplexing and ControlPersist-SSH Multiplexing Options in Ansible, SSH Multiplexing and ControlPersistControlMaster, SSH Multiplexing Options in Ansible ControlPath, SSH Multiplexing Options in Ansible ControlPersist, SSH Multiplexing Options in Ansible manually enabling, Manually Enabling SSH Multiplexing options in Ansible, SSH Multiplexing Options in Ansible ssh-agent program, Telling Ansible About Your Test Server ssh_args connection, Default Settings ssh_connectionscontrol_path, Default Settings pipelining, Default Settings scp_if_ssh, Default Settings ssh_args, Default Settings SSL, TLS vs., Getting Fancier: TLS Support staging environments, Example: Deploying a Django App stale data, Fact Caching start at task, Start-at-Task start of file, YAML syntax, Start of File stat module return values, The Assert Module state, dict instance, Adding a New Instance to a Group state_code, Adding a New Instance to a Group static assets, Nginx: The Web Server step flag, Limiting Which Tasks Run strings, YAML syntax, Strings su configuration, Default Settings subsets, fact, Viewing a Subset of Facts Sudo, Sudo and Agent Forwarding sudo clause, Adding the Sudo Clause to a Task sudo configuration, Default Settings sudo setting, Plays sudo_exe configuration, Default Settings sudo_flags configuration, Default Settings sudo_user configuration, Default Settings Supervisor, Setting Service Configuration Filesas Mezzanine process manager, Supervisor: The Process Manager Docker alternative to, Mezzanine supports_check_mode initializer argument, AnsibleModule Initializer Parameters surround_by_quote function, Writing Your Own Filter su_exe configuration, Default Settings su_flag configuration, Default Settings su_user configuration, Default Settings syncdb command, Running django-manage Commands syntax check, Syntax Check syntax, Ansible, Easy-to-Read Syntax syslog_facility configuration, Default Settings system-level packages, Using Iteration (with_items) to Install Multiple Packages system_warnings configuration, Default Settings T tag groups, Auto-Generated Groups tag(s)added to task/play for debugging, Tags applying to existing EC2 resources, Applying Tags to Existing Resources defining EC2 dynamic groups with, Defining Dynamic Groups with Tags-Nicer Group Names group names for, Nicer Group Names in EC2, Tags tagged_instances module, Adding a New Instance to a Group task queues, Introduction task(s), How Ansible Works, Plays, Putting It All Togetheradding sudo clause, Adding the Sudo Clause to a Task changed_when and failed_when clauses, Dealing with Badly Behaved Commands: changed_when and failed_when-Dealing with Badly Behaved Commands: changed_when and failed_when complex arguments in, Complex Arguments in Tasks: A Brief Digression-Complex Arguments in Tasks: A Brief Digression in playbooks, Tasks limiting, for debugging, Limiting Which Tasks Run listing in playbook, Listing Tasks in a Playbook running on control machine, Running a Task on the Control Machine running on machine other than host, Running a Task on a Machine Other Than the Host running on one host at a time, Running on One Host at a Time running only once, Running Only Once Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible (books), Is Ansible Too Simple?


pages: 338 words: 104,815

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The US Department of Transportation makes regular reports to Congress that estimate the total number of vehicle miles traveled in the country that year and predict road traffic up to twenty years into the future. Year after year, the reports have forecast steady growth in traffic volume. Yet that growth tapered off in the late 1990s, and traffic volume actually declined slightly in the early 2000s. Eric Sundquist, the director of the University of Wisconsin’s State Smart Transportation Initiative, analyzed these forecasts in 2013 and discovered that the models had been created based on trends that held true in the 1980s and hadn’t been updated since. The financial and societal stakes of using such outdated models are high. Underpredict future traffic, and roads will be clogged and crumbling.

Department of Transportation “Status of the Nation’s Highways, Bridges and Transit: Condition and Performance” reports are online [https://www.transit.dot.gov/research-innovation/status-nations-highways-bridges-and-transit-condition-and-performance]. Sundquist’s analysis: E. Sundquist, “New Travel Demand Projections Are Due from U.S. DOT: Will They Be Accurate this Time?,” State Smart Transportation Initiative, December 16, 2013 [https://ssti.us/2013/12/16/new-travel-demand-projections-are-due-from-u-s-dot-will-they-be-accurate-this-time/]. Additional discussion: A. Gelman, “The Commissar for Traffic Presents the Latest Five-Year Plan,” Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, January 21, 2014 [https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/01/21/commissar-traffic-presents-latest-five-year-plan/]; C.


The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles by Astronaut Ron Garan, Muhammad Yunus

Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, book scanning, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, fake it until you make it, global village, Google Earth, Indoor air pollution, jimmy wales, low earth orbit, optical character recognition, overview effect, private spaceflight, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, Stephen Hawking, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber for X, web of trust

Pulling back to look at the situation from the orbital perspective, though, reveals that more than 1.2 million people are killed in traffic accidents each year—╉the equivalent of wiping out the entire population of a city the size of Dallas, Kampala, or Prague—╉and would view this situation as unacceptable. Such perspective would lead us to take a wider focus and to look for ways to incorporate information technology in the design of smart transportation systems that prevent cars from crashing in the first place.7 The orbital perspective also would take account of environmental and geopolitical issues, in addition to safety concerns. If by working together as a global community we can design an infrastructure that enables cars on the road to know the location of all other vehicles on the road, to know the road conditions, to employ sensors that react to any circumstance thousands of times faster than a human, we could, in effect, create a transportation system in which cars do not crash into each other or into anything else.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

This reduces overall diversity, and essential services start to suffer because people working in the service support professions cannot afford to live in certain areas. Love them or loathe them, it seems fairly certain that cities are here to stay and that they will get much bigger in the future. They will also get much smarter, hopefully in terms of the people living in them, but certainly in terms of the way that smart transport and infrastructure are deployed across them, linking individual elements together to create intelligent and to some extent self-aware systems (see Chapter 13). the condensed idea More people in big cities timeline 1800 3 percent of the world’s people live in cities 1950s 83 cities worldwide with populations over 1 million 2000 Population of greater Tokyo area exceeds 35 million 2007 468 cities with populations over 1 million 2008 Over 50 percent of humanity lives an urban existence 2018 Detroit declared a “hollow city” with population falling 20 percent per year 2030 60 percent of the world’s people live in cities 2050 Half of Africa’s population live in cities 12 Local energy networks Local power, the idea of producing and distributing electricity in the future from local sources or networks, represents a radical shift in the balance of power away from the fossil fuel and nuclear-run power plants that currently dominate the power industry.


Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things by Alasdair Gilchrist

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air gap, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, cloud computing, connected car, cyber-physical system, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, DevOps, digital twin, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, global value chain, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, microservices, millennium bug, OSI model, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, platform as a service, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RFID, Salesforce, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, software as a service, stealth mode startup, supply-chain management, The future is already here, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, web application, WebRTC, Y2K

Furthermore, in some high-technology manufacturing, the number of employees involved in non-manufacturing roles, such as R&D, HR, office support, and IT, make up the large majority of employees. Industry 4.0 places high importance on the Internet of services, where manufacturers can create or consume available services within their value chain. These services, such as inventory control, logistics, and smart transportation, will reduce costs, improve efficiency, and ultimately productivity. A critical challenge for manufacturers will be to approach the era of digital manufacturing in a more pragmatic way. Certainly manufacturers involved in heavily labor-intensive sectors such as jewelry, textiles and toys, will stay on the lowwage path.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

It’s simply Jack, a few twenty-somethings who either code software or perform analysis (for instance, on how many cars it takes to match the emissions of one container ship), a bunch of donors (most of them entrepreneurs), and a handful of websites that help support and organize a “guerrilla warfare” effort that simply wouldn’t be possible without the digital infrastructure. Jack uses social media to mobilize not just donors but also government officials, journalists, Facebook supporters, and NGO staffers behind particular causes, such as the “cash-for-clunkers” initiative he co-organized in the summer of 2009 and the “smart transportation” initiative aimed at getting the New York City taxi fleet converted to hybrid vehicles. The idea for cash for clunkers—in which the U.S. government offered citizens money to trade in their gas guzzlers for more fuel-efficient models—started off as a white paper written by Hidary and a colleague at the Center for American Progress utilizing data from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which they then managed to get read by key staffers and influencers on Capitol Hill.


pages: 357 words: 110,017

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

Eventually, Bender is forced to resort to “what he used to do while the possessor of empty pockets. He began assuming false identities, such as engineer, medical officer, or tenor … to get a room.”25 The million roubles he lusted after for so long have turned out to be virtually useless—since in the command economy, there is virtually nothing for them to buy. Everything he dreamt of—smart transport, luxurious accommodation, fine food—is allocated by the Party and the Plan. Ilf and Petrov’s frustrated hero was a victim of the second generic strategy for fixing money’s failings: the strategy of containment. In the period of so-called “War Communism” immediately following the socialist revolution in Russia, the young Soviet Union had attempted the more radical Spartan solution of abolishing money completely.26 “In a socialist society,” the Commissar for Finance had explained in a bashful apology made to the inaugural All-Russian Congress of the Council of the National Economy in 1918, “finance is not supposed to exist, and therefore I beg to be excused for its existence and for my own appearance here.”27 The new regime had lost no time in working to spare the Commissar any further blushes.


pages: 423 words: 129,831

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

On some projects, old and new approaches achieve identical standards. On others, the differences are likely to be invisible. A highway through mountains might have a thinner bed of concrete where it rests on bedrock, for instance. A worn road might be patched, rather than reconstructed. In Pennsylvania, officials are beating the drum for "Smart Transportation," a program that calls on engineers to reexamine all of their assumptions about road building. "The old style was that if we had a road that was congested, we'd project the traffic out twenty-five years and add lanes to accommodate that future traffic," said Allen D. Biehler, the state's transportation secretary.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

In workplaces, many of those same smart devices are networked together with surveillance cameras, sensors that detect customer movements, and everything else. Smart systems in buildings will provide more efficient lighting, elevator operation, climate control, and other services. Cities are starting to embed smart sensors in roads, streetlights, and sidewalk squares, as well as smart energy grids and smart transportation networks. Soon, cities will be able to control your appliances and other home devices to optimize energy use. Networks of smart driverless cars will automatically route themselves to where they’re needed, minimizing energy use in the process. Sensors and controls in the streets will better regulate traffic, speed up both police and medical response times, and automatically report road flooding.


pages: 486 words: 132,784

Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions by Brett Stern

Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Build a better mousetrap, business process, cloud computing, computer vision, cyber-physical system, distributed generation, driverless car, game design, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart transportation, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the market place, value engineering, Yogi Berra

For years, Xerox was primarily committed to the development of printer tech­nology. But a few years ago, we switched our focus from printer technology to business services. “Business services” can mean many different things. It can mean helping healthcare providers and insurers manage information, management of smart transportation networks, and aiding in processing information in the education system. Stating it simply, we changed from operating primarily in one field with its technology needs to many fields with more diverse needs. We researchers were given a great deal of leeway to invent in these new service areas and our managers challenged us to show what we could do.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

The landscapes that came up the most frequently were primarily replicas of real-life cities, spanning the Middle East to East Asia: Abu Dhabi Satellite City, Hyderabad, Bangkok, the Singaporean man-made island, the Greater Bay Area of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao, Shanghai Lingang, Xiong’an New Area, Chiba of Japan—places that, until now, Chamal had only read about online. One day Chamal received instructions to complete a mission on the Singaporean man-made island. A disturbance on the ocean floor in North Java had triggered a tsunami and the infrasound completely paralyzed the island’s automated smart transportation system. A ten-meter tsunami would hit the island in exactly six minutes. Over a hundred dysfunctional autonomous cars and their passengers were careening down the roadway, likely to crash or, like sitting ducks, be washed away. Chamal and the other racers were instructed to seize the wheels of these vehicles, turn on manual control before more accidents could happen, and help connect the cars to the emergency network infrastructure.


pages: 409 words: 145,128

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton

clean water, Frederick Winslow Taylor, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, General Motors Futurama, invisible hand, jitney, new economy, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal

The Kansas City Railways used pictures to show newspaper readers that “one street car has the carrying capacity of many automobiles and occupies very little of the pavement space” and urged them to “remedy” Traffic Efficiency versus Motor Freedom 159 congestion by riding street cars and buses.58 At cinemas in Birmingham, Alabama, audiences saw a short movie distributed by the local street railway, “Mrs. Birmingham Goes Shopping.” By making fun of the frustration of motorists fighting traffic and looking for a place to park, it cast the streetcar as the smart transportation mode for modern shoppers.59 Like the railways, streetcar manufacturers began to spread the traffic control word beyond the Chamber of Commerce, conference rooms and city engineering offices. Westinghouse bought full-page advertisements in national magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post, Forbes, and Nation’s Business.


pages: 1,025 words: 150,187

ZeroMQ by Pieter Hintjens

AGPL, anti-pattern, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, cloud computing, Debian, distributed revision control, domain-specific language, eat what you kill, Eben Moglen, exponential backoff, factory automation, fail fast, fault tolerance, fear of failure, finite state, Internet of things, iterative process, no silver bullet, power law, premature optimization, profit motive, pull request, revision control, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Skype, smart transportation, software patent, Steve Jobs, Valgrind, WebSocket

Crazy, Beautiful, and Easy You need a goal that’s crazy and simple enough to get people out of bed in the morning. Your community has to attract the very best people, and that demands something special. With ØMQ, we said we were going to make “the Fastest. Messaging. Ever,” which qualifies as a good motivator. If we’d said we were going to make “a smart transport layer that’ll connect your moving pieces cheaply and flexibly across your enterprise,” we’d have failed. Then your work must be beautiful, immediately useful, and attractive. Your contributors are users who want to explore just a little beyond where they are now. Make it simple, elegant, and brutally clean.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

With the possibility of ubiquitous road-pricing in the UK and EU being actively considered, the tracking of entire societies’ patterns of mobility seems set to radically intensify. 9.8 The Boundaries of the ‘Lower Manhattan Security Initiative’ and the ‘Ring of Steel’, established around London’s financial centre to stop IRA bombers in the 1990s. Similar efforts to build security tracking into ‘smart’ transport projects are underway in the US. In 2002, as we saw in Chapter 4, the well-established E-ZPass system, which facilitates access to faster lanes on highways in the US and Canada, was extended as a means of biometrically checking people crossing the border.121 Also in 2002, ITS America, a group of US corporations which designs and builds ‘intelligent transport’ equipment, set up its own homeland security task force to oversee the computerization of transport in ways that supported increased securitization of US urban life.122 In 2007 New York City announced a $100 million plan to turn Lower Manhattan into a ‘ring of steel’ – a much more advanced version of what was built around London’s financial centre in response to IRA bombings there in the 1990s (Figure 9.8).


Smart Grid Standards by Takuro Sato

business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, data acquisition, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, exponential backoff, factory automation, Ford Model T, green new deal, green transition, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Iridium satellite, iterative process, knowledge economy, life extension, linear programming, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, Thomas Davenport

In 2009, the Presidential Committee on Green Growth issued the guideline, Building an Advanced Green Country, which specifies the contents of the South Korea Smart Grid. In August 2009, the Korea Smart Grid Institute (KSGI) was launched to promote the development of the Smart Grid in South Korea. KSGI issued Korea’s Smart Grid Roadmap, which specifies five sectors for implementing the Smart Grid: smart power grid, smart consumer, smart transportation, smart renewable, and smart electricity service [55]. In the first stage (2010–2012), the implementation direction was to construct and operate the Smart Grid test bed in pilot projects. In the second stage (2012–2020), the implementation direction is to expand the Smart Grid into metropolitan areas.