2018-11-12

Planning & Strategy.

• "Addressing sexual harassment in all its forms is a crucial step toward solving the gender imbalance in engineering." Only 11% of practicing engineers are women.
• Mouser acquired Crowd Supply.

Two readers sent in questions about tariffs this week:

1. Nick, a producer from NPR's Planet Money is looking your stories of tariff engineering or tariff reclassification.
2. Dan of Gavekal Dragonomics is trying to figure out the impact of the tariffs on production in China; he'd love to hear from you if you've decided to shift production from China to other countries.

Making & Manufacturing.

• A good overview of the various equipment needed to manufacture olive oil.
• How landlocked aquariums get (or make) seawater.
• On Rocket Lab's first commercial launch + an update on rocket startups worldwide.
• A good overview of Toyota's New Global Architecture, a simplification project that aims to reduce their SKU count significantly.
• Dyson will build electric cars in Singapore. “Dyson already manufactures its electric motors in the island country with assembly of its appliances such as hair dryers and vacuums in Malaysia and the Philippines, having ceased UK production more than a decade ago.”
• Origin (a sponsor of The Prepared) launched an open materials development platform for stereolithography.

Maintenance, Repair & Operations.

• The NYC L train shutdown has an official start date: 2019.04.27. Meanwhile, the MTA has 191 malfunctioning signal timers which result in trains going well below the speed limit.

Distribution & Logistics.

• On Maersk + IBM's blockchain joint venture, TradeLens: "There are fantastic benefits to be had from a blockchain-enabled shipping platform: cost savings, reduced error, increased profit, etc. However, these benefits can’t outweigh the undeniable reality facing Maersk’s competitors: to join the TradeLens network is to make Maersk more profitable."
• Ford is apparently using NASA's D-Wave quantum computers will help them solve the traveling salesman problem for fleet-managed vehicles like their Chariot service.

Inspection, Testing & Analysis.

• Another excellent analysis of Apple Maps from Justin O'Beirne. Apple appears, at first blush, to be algorithmically extracting geographical information (parks, tennis courts, building outlines) from satellite imagery, but a closer look suggests that at least some of this data is created by humans.

Tangents.

• An interview with artist Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs, which creates really spectacular robotic installations.
• "People do not need bike lanes to ride a bike. People driving cars need bikes lanes to protect them from intimidating or harming people on bikes."

A photo tour of the Kodak Ektachrome factory.