capital use over 15 years would save $90 billion in avoided or deferred capital spending. In commercial aviation, 1 percent in fuel savings would net $30 billion over 15 years. And a 1 percent improvement in efficiency at the world’s gas-fired power plants would save $66 billion over 15 years. Machines with sensors that can alert their operators before they fail are also cheaper to fix. Stone notes that companies that wait for equipment to fail spend an average of 13 percent of replacement asset value annually on maintenance. Companies that employ proactive condition-based maintenance, by contrast, face a slim cost of just 2 percent. Stone says that 11 percentage-point spread between the worst companies and the best-performing companies is where APM comes in, saving customers millions of dollars. One early APM adopter is Qatar’s RasGas, a liquefied natural gas producer that generates 45 percent of the country’s GDP. Other customers like Pitney Bowes write their own apps on Predix to optimize their equipment, and GE is also using the platform to make its factories work better. One big reason why this is happening is Moore’s law. “Computers and other digital advances are doing for our mental power – the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments – what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle,” write Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in the bookThe Second Machine Age. “They are allowing us to blow past previous limitation and into a new territory.”
Bellevue Middle Schoolers Soar To Championship In World’s Largest Rocket Contest A team of middle schoolers from Bellevue, Wash., nicknamed the Space Potatoes, captured the top prize at the 2016 Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) National Finals. The five-student team from Odle Middle School outscored 100 of the best rocketry teams in the country in the finals. Nearly 5,000 students on 789 teams participated in the overall competition from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Space Potatoes team members are Mikaela Ikeda, 12, Larry Jing, 13, Karl Deerkop, 14, Srivatshan (Sri) Sakthinarayanan, 13, and Stephanie Han , 13. According to a news realease, they were awarded more than $20,000 in scholarships and funds for their school. Sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry, the competition required students to build a rocket that flies to exactly 850 feet and safely returns a payload of two raw eggs within 44-46 seconds. At the National Finals, students were required to adjust their rockets “on the fly” to hit new flight/duration parameters for a second round of launches.
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