Tech management

First FAA-Approved Drone Delivery Is a Success, but Does It Matter? – IEEE Spectrum

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First FAA-Approved Drone Delivery Is a Success, but Does It Matter? 

I’ve been tracking the potential for drone (Autonomous vehicle) delivery of packages since before Amazon proposed it. I’m generally very skeptical that it can play a major role in delivering routine packages. And I certainly thought Amazon’s claimed timetable was blowing smoke. (As it turned out to be.)

Basic issues include safety, landing somewhere in urban areas, weather (except where I live) and payload/range/weight. Longer range or bigger payload require a larger vehicle, which is more of a  potential safety hazard. Micro navigation (phone poles) might also be a problem, as stated in this IEEE article, but I can envision technical solutions to that issue.

Here is a 2013 IEEE article that makes the basic anti-Amazon case.  Amazon was talking about being ready in 2015!

Yet over a longer period, say before 2020, there are niche applications that will be feasible. Whether they will be economically sensible remains to be seen. Rather clearly, deliveries will start with small, high-value, urgent packages.  Here’s a  video about a rural demonstration of delivering meds.

Here is my comment to someone who said drone delivery was impossible because of theft and safety.

Theft is an issue, but there are many potential partial solutions. For example, once stolen the drone would not function. (It could still be stripped for parts, but that has possible solutions as well.) So it becomes an arms race/incentive system, just like stealing packages from your front door.

   Safety is an issue in cities, but suppose the drones become as safe as a delivery truck driving through your neighborhood. A six rotor drone is pretty robust. Safety is less of an issue in some regions. And there may even be ways to “crash safe,” including airbags, parachutes, etc.

Regulatory fear is likely to continue to be a big issue in the USA. In my opinion, that is a shame, and will destroy the US lead in the technology (for which there are many good applications – just probably not package delivery). So I’m glad to see Amazon is taking a role in proposing sensible regulation. 

First FAA-Approved Drone Delivery Is a Success, but Does It Matter? - IEEE Spectrum

General drone technology clearly has a productive future. But my guess is that the US will be pushed aside by other countries that are less hung up about regulating every possible problem. (E.g. Australia?)

Tesla is tiny – so why is it worth $35 billion?

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It’s still hard for me to understand Tesla’s market cap, currently $35B ($35,000,000,000). Sales of 11K units/quarter are still smaller than tiny (for an auto company). Of course if it achieves a 50% annual growth trajectory for 5 years, that would justify a huge value – but I have not read anything saying that they are able to scale manucturing at that rate. (Admission: I used to consistently say that Apple was over-valued. And I was consistently wrong.)

“Tesla said in a filing Thursday that it delivered 11,507 vehicles during the April-through-June period, a 52 percent increase compared with the same quarter a year ago.”

I also did not realize that Musk was not a founder of the company.  (1) Breakthrough Strategy and Innovation.

Using data mining to ban trolls on League of Legends

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Something I just found for my Big Data class.

Riot rolls out automated, instant bans for League of Legends trolls

Machine learning system aims to remove problem players “within 15 minutes.”

An interesting thread of player comments has a good discussion of potential problems with automated bans. Only time will tell how well the company develops the system to get around these issues.

This company also took an experimental approach to banning players. And hired 3 PhDs in Cognitive Science to develop it. (Just to be clear, their experiments did not appear to be automated A/B style experiments.) After the jump is a screen shot from that system.

League of Legends screen shot

But, I’m not tempted to play League of Legends to study player behavior and experiment with getting banned! (I don’t think I’ve ever tried an MMO beyond some prototypes 15 years ago.)  If any players want to post your observations here, great.

Chartjunk: Second-worst graphic of the month!

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A bad graphic from a pro-solar group is perhaps not surprising. (See previous post.) Here is one from Bloomberg  that verges on incomprehensible. Bloomberg as a source is surprising.

Which way is up? (Answer: down is up)

Which way is up? (Answer: down is up)

Looking closer, it appears that Skill Desirability increase from left to right, and Skill Frequency increases from top to bottom?!  Graphs should be drawn so that UP means higher.  In any case, it should not take prolonged inspection to deduce which variable is on the X axis.

The graphic also manages to make as many schools as possible look good at something. In Financial Services, the top 3 schools for Communications skills are listed as  Tuck, McCombs, and Kellogg. But in Technology, the top 3 schools change to Fuqua, Haas, and Kellogg. And for Consulting, the top 3  are London, Harvard, and Ivey. Since “Communication Skills” are the most desired skill of all according to the graph, eight schools can say they are in the Top 3 for teaching the most sought-after skills.

Why RC drones won’t be a danger to small planes

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The rules for flying radio controlled aircraft are under tremendous debate and change, mainly because of two new technologies that have together created a new business. The  technologies are tiny flight management systems costing about $100, and excellent lightweight cameras like the GoPro (invented by a UCSD grad). The new business is using drones for low-altitude photography (and eventually for other applications, although IMO not for package delivery).

Congress put the Federal Aviation Administration in charge of figuring out what rule changes are needed. So far it has done a slow and weak job. (One result is that the U.S. has lost leadership of the industry, and may even become a backwater. That is a topic for another day.)

Pilots are instinctively concerned about risks to manned aircraft, from unmanned aircraft. Much argument back and forth has ensued, but there is little or no modeling or investigation. (What happens when a 2 pound quadcopter collides with small plane at 140 knots? Apparently there have been zero experiments on the issue.)  Here is an interesting blog post on this issue.

Why See and Avoid Doesn’t Work – AVweb Insider Article.

My take on this issue is that the likelihood of serious air-to-air collisions is tiny. Far fewer than bird strikes, for example. A much bigger sour of injuries will be untrained idiots flying drones over crowds of people.

When the doctor’s away, the patient is more likely to survive | Ars Technica

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When the doctor’s away, the patient is more likely to survive | Ars Technica.

Very surprising. When cardiologists are away from the hospital, deaths after heart failure or cardiac arrest declined. I’ll probably use this in my course this Spring. (Or perhaps in both courses: Big Data, and Operations Quality in Healthcare.)

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NIH getting more serious about publishing clinical trial results

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Under-reporting of clinical trials has been a problem for for decades (if not more). Only in the last few years has the medical community realized the pernicious effects this has on our knowledge about “what works” in medicine. If “bad” results don’t get permitted, all kinds of problems ensue, such as overly-optimistic views of new drugs, repeating of expensive and potentially dangerous research, and general waste of money. Since the NIH is such a big funder of medical research, this affects taxpayers too!

In any case, the NIH continues its slow (but steady?) crackdown on this issue. They are even threatening to cut off funding for researchers who don’t make their results available!  (Of course a lot of research is funded by pharmaceutical companies, so this is hardly a comprehensive threat.)

I track this kind of thing because of my interest in “How societies learn” about technology. Forgetting and ignoring are powerful forces in retarding learning.

Sharing and Reporting the Results of Clinical Trials

Kathy L. Hudson, PhD1; Francis S. Collins, MD, MPH1
JAMA. Published online November 19, 2014. doi:10.1001/jama.2014.10716