The Wall Street Journal‘s recent special report, “The Future of Cities,” included an article on large road tunnels (“Boring Has Never Been So Exciting,” by Daniel Michaels). It celebrated the great improvement in cost-effective tunneling made possible by the invention and perfection of the tunnel boring machine (TBM). These amazing...
Several years ago, physician, statistician, sword swallower and vibrant lecturer Hans Rosling produced a fascinating 4-minute video that presented 120,000 data points and showcased how mostly western nations became healthy and prosperous in just 200 years – after countless millennia of malnutrition, disease, wretched poverty and early death.More recently, professor...
Not only has job creation and new business formation been weak in the current business cycle, it has been more concentrated geographically than in the past. Unfortunately for the Old Dominion, between 2010 and 2014 that concentration did not occur here. This analysis points to very different futures for American...
Interest continues to grow in making use of partial automation to enable big-rigs to travel close together in platoons on long-distance highways. In addition to reduced accidents from partial automation (lane-keeping and connected adaptive cruise control), platooning offers significant reductions in fuel consumption. Two platooning demonstrations have been carried out...
In his annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett—the world’s third richest person—remarked on the state of the U.S. economy and current political fracas by writing: It’s an election year, and candidates can’t stop speaking about our country’s problems (which, of course, only they can solve). As...
