“We looked at Paris from a different prospective and it inspired us to create this fundamentally new map of Paris metro system, regional trains, and trams”

The New Paris Metro Map

We live in a world of self-driving space craft!

Many years ago, cars took hundreds of thousands of people to build. Ford’s River Rouge plan had over 100,000 employees.

Then two things happened. First, sub assembly meant that jobs moved to suppliers and then the big move to automation started to eliminate jobs across the process.

Today a car takes less than half the employees to build compared to in 1990. This is even though they are more complex machines and have to be built to smaller tolerances.

Looks like this is now about to happen to the electronics industry. Massive factories in China have been built on the back of the mobile phone business. They are about to get a lot smaller.

Rise of the robots: 60,000 workers culled from just one factory as China’s struggling electronics hub turns to artificial intelligence

The lorry and the remains of my train line.

RER B : un camion tombe sur les voies et s’embrase

I take the train on the RER B every day to get to the office. Overall it’s a good service, mainly because of get to the office before the morning rush, and leave after the evening one.

Wednesday afternoon this week that all fell apart. A lorry fell off a bridge onto the tracks and burst into flames damaging the infrastructure in both directions. The driver was seriously injured and I hope that he recovers soon.

However, what interested me was the response and the information supplied to me as a traveller, and where it failed.

The RER B is a major line linking the two Paris airports and travelling under the centre of the city via two of the largest stations in Europe (Gard du Nord and Châtelet – Les Halles). Being a major line, there is a web site, a twitter feed, a blog, an app (in fact two) but still a lot of it was guess work.

Back to the incident, Thursday morning a delay to the overnight works meant that the line wasn’t open before 8h30. There was information about a replacement bus service etc. but I set off as usual at 7h30 because there was no information stating that if I’d waited an hour things might improve.

So thousands of passengers ended up waiting for a temporary bus, almost all of us looking at our phones. Phones with no up to date information.

The missing bit of the jigsaw is coping with the temporary, the exceptional, basically the unplanned. And this is exactly where mobile is at it’s best. Where is the app for that?

“FOR the past week, France has felt like a country on the verge of civic insurrection.”

Violent strikes against labour reforms are causing chaos in France | The Economist

Brilliant way to start an article, only issue is, that isn’t what France has felt like. There are strikes and awful incidents but the vast majority of life goes on.

The issue is now I can’t read any other article in The Economist this week and believe that it’s true. Probably not next week either…

And so it goes on.

“From that point onwards, he started sending the players individual emails detailing their faults and submitting video clips to highlight his dissatisfaction. Except by that stage a lot of the players were so disillusioned many ignored the emails or redirected them straight to their trash. Van Gaal suspected as much and had a tracker fitted so he could check if the emails were opened and for how long.”

Louis van Gaal tactics left Manchester United players close to mutiny | Daniel Taylor | Football | The Guardian