“Imagine a building that tells you – before it happens – that the heating is about to fail. Some companies are using machine learning to do just that. It’s called predictive maintenance. Software firm CGnal, based in Milan, Italy, recently analysed a year’s worth of data from the heating and ventilation units in an Italian hospital. Sensors are now commonly built into heating, ventilation and air conditioning units, and the team had records such as temperature, humidity and electricity use, relating to appliances in operating theatres and first aid rooms as well as corridors.”
“They trained a machine learning algorithm on data from the first half of 2015, looking for differences in the readings of similar appliances. They then tested it on data from the second half of the year – could it predict faults before they happened? The system predicted 76 out of 124 real faults, including 41 out of 44 where an appliance’s temperature rose above tolerable levels, with a false positive rate of 5 per cent.”
Since retiring, I’m occasionally asked if I’d consider working part-time. Uh, no. But this afternoon I thought of a job that I might find interesting. If such a job exists. If some company/business/service was doing one of those “is it human or is it a bot?” things, that might be fun. Sort of a half-assed Turing Test kind of thing? But I’d want total freedom in my responses.
I’m about halfway through 
According to Gleick, building the atomic bomb dramatically affected the lives of the scientists who created it. The Japanese lives lost to this terrible weapon have always been balanced against those that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan. Like my father, for instance. Japan surrenders, they turn the ships around and head home. Discharged March 9, 1946 in St. Louis. Meets and marries my mom (March 23, 1946) who was living in St. Louis. Happy ending. For some.