We are at the beginning of a revolution that could be compared to going from the buggy whip to the steering wheel — Dr. Alain Kornhauser

By Mike Sheldrick

Alain Kornhauser, Ph.D. is Professor of Operations, Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. He is also the faculty chair of the Princeton Automated Vehicle and Engineering Group. For more than 30 years, he has been a thoughtful, insightful and often provocative thinker on advanced transportation concepts. He founded the eponymous, ALK, a leading mapping and navigation and logistics company that is now a division of Trimble, a GPS pioneer.

In 2005, Alain led Princeton’s entry in the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge, an event that many regard as the key catalyst for efforts to make robotic vehicle technology more accessible to civilian use.

We interviewed Alain at the Automated Vehicles Symposium, held in San Francisco in July. While he offered no dates for his belief that driverless vehicles are close at hand, he articulated the compelling economics that will propel their development and adoption. One of the most intriguing notions was his idea that far from requiring elaborate, costly infrastructure, driverless vehicles could actually function autonomously in many highway environments.

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Chicago Tribune

Key oil and gas facilities along the Texas Gulf Coast have temporarily shut down as Harvey pounds the region with torrential rain and high winds, virtually assuring gasoline prices will rise in the storm’s aftermath.

Even before the Harvey made landfall late Friday, dozens of oil and gas platforms had been evacuated, at least three refineries had closed and at least two petrochemical plants had suspended operations.

How soon they reopen depends on the severity of flooding and the resumption of power to the areas.

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By Mike Cieri

You’ve found that candidate who has the qualifications and experience and they start work next week.

How you welcome and train that individual can have a profound effect on whether they stay and how productive they are.

Onboarding is the perfect opportunity to make a positive, lasting impression on a new hire but you must deliver. Taking the time up front to develop and implement the six key elements into your onboarding process will deliver to the bottom line with increase retention, and productivity.

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Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

Lane departure warning, a technology designed to address an often-fatal type of crash, is preventing crashes on U.S. roads, new research from IIHS shows.

A separate study shows that blind spot detection also is yielding benefits when it comes to preventing lane-change crashes.

The studies are the latest in a series by Jessica Cicchino, IIHS vice president for research, that evaluates different crash avoidance features by looking at data from police-reported crashes (see “Crashes avoided: Front crash prevention slashes police-reported rear-end crashes,” Jan. 28, 2016, and “Rearview cameras reduce police-reported backing crashes,” Nov. 17, 2016).

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Time

Austin Russell hops in a motorized cart and goes whizzing through a cavernous building on the edge of San Francisco Bay that is normally used to disembark cruise-ship passengers.

As the lanky 22-year-old CEO tools around, he passes a mannequin, a tire and a co-worker on a bicycle–all elements of a demonstration to show how well his company’s sensor can monitor the environment. On a nearby screen, those shapes appear in rainbow colors that signify exactly how far away they are.

All of it is the result of laser beams shooting out of a black box and bouncing off more than a million points around the room every second.

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The Guardian

The government has given the go-ahead for the first trials of convoys of semi-automated trucks on UK motorways.

Up to three wirelessly connected HGVs will travel in convoy, with acceleration, braking and steering controlled by the lead vehicle, a concept named platooning. Each lorry will have a driver in the cab ready to retake control at any time.

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Bloomberg

Car sales in the U.S. have been rising for seven consecutive years now, and it’s denting the value of whatever is currently parked in your garage or driveway.

With so many new cars rolling out of dealerships lots and instantly becoming used cars, the secondary market is glutted and the pace of depreciation is rapidly accelerating.

Your not-that-old car might not be a clunker quite yet, but it’s probably a lot closer than you think.

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The Detroit Bureau

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed recently the company planned to unveil a semi-truck in September, adding it would be capable of handling long-haul loads.

Apparently, he forgot to add “just barely.”

The new truck, which Musk has implied in the past would be on par with current trucks or better. However, a new Reuters report reveals that the new truck will be capable of 200 to 300 miles on a charge. Most long-haul trucks can go 1,000 miles before refueling.

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What benefits do you provide your customers, so they’ll open their wallets and spend more?

By Wendy Eichenbaum

There are many ways that you could improve your customer experience (CX). For the product, you could redesign a current feature or add a new feature. For support, you could expand your phone hours, or shorten the response time to email. For marketing, you could refresh your website, or open a new social media channel. But you only have a certain amount to spend on the improvements, so what do you address?

You have to find out what your customers value. If you add a new feature, will they flock to the product? Or is the feature irrelevant when it comes to their purchasing decision?

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BBC 

For people who manage hundreds of employees and dozens of projects, having a foolproof way to plan the day is crucial to performance.

If you want a job interview with Li Fan, head of engineering at Pinterest, you’ll need to wait until Friday.

Fan categorizes the types of meetings she takes by days of the week. Mondays are for large group meetings and Tuesdays are for speaking with people one-on-one. Wednesdays and Thursdays are for ad hoc requests or various monthly meetings.

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