Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1156106
October/November/December 2019 I 5 From the President, Jeff Beavers, RCDD, OSP, CFHP ROAD CLOSED DUE TO NETWORK OUTAGE (Unless You're Fond of Mississippi) shows that their evidence is mostly irrelevant. The issue is confusing because the skills required to work with new tech- nologies are hard to measure. They are even harder to man- age. Understanding this controversy sheds some light on what employers and government need to do to deal with a very real problem." 3 "Why are skills sometimes hard to measure and to manage? Because new technologies frequently require specific new skills that schools don't teach and that labor markets don't supply. Since information technologies have radically changed much work over the last couple of decades, employers have had persistent difficulty finding workers who can make the most of these new technologies." 4 Technology to some degree is still considered an amenity and something nice to have. Technology at times is referred to as the fourth utility, and it is regarded as a must have, but it is not. I did not know it back then, but my counting 1-Mississippi, 2- Mississippi and so on was what I understand now as latency. I cannot imagine a scenario where any latency from sensing and initiating the braking process to when the brakes are engaged would be acceptable. The uninitiated may not know what ICT is, but they might understand "IoT" and "connected." A road closed due to network outage is an "amenity" that will not be accepted. It will demand a skilled workforce. Be safe; someone is counting on you. REFERENCES: 1. Pretz, Kathy. "Internet of Things Technology Will Connect Highways, Street Lights, and Vehicles." IEEE Spectrum. 20 June 2019. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/ieee-products- services/internet-of-things-technology-will-connect-highways- street-lights-and-vehicles 2. "6 Key Connectivity Requirements of Autonomous Driving," IEEE Spectrum, https://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/ advanced-cars/6-key-connectivity-requirements-of-autono- mous-driving 3. White Paper: Why Certify Data Centre Structured Cabling, https://www.flukenetworks.com/content/white-paper-why- certify-data-centre-structured-cabling 4. Bessen, James. "Employers Aren't Just Whining – the 'Skills Gap' Is Real." Harvard Business Review. 25 August 2014. https://hbr.org/2014/08/employers-arent-just-whining-the- skills-gap-is-real During my early driving years, I had access to my Dad's Jeep. It was a blue 1978 Jeep CJ5 Renegade Levi's Edition. I didn't appreciate the value that Jeep would have years later. If only I owned it today. I used to joke about driving it and how I had to plan ahead to stop. The braking process was as follows: (1) step on the brake pedal (2) count… 1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi, 3-Mississippi, 4-Mississippi (3) then, the Jeep would come to a stop. In part, it was due to older technology and the use of drum brakes. Drum brakes tend to heat up quickly. When they heat up, they tend to fade because hot brakes produce less fric- tion, which makes them less effective. The other part was due to my driving habits, such as erratic driving and braking too late that contributed to brake fade. The factors were that technology and drum brakes were at odds with the human element, which was my driving expertise or lack thereof. Many of the technologies we know, such as the emer- gence of PoE lighting, are technically doable, but the human element—change, territorial, regulatory, jurisdictional—are often barriers to acceptance. The internet of things (IoT) will connect highways, street lights, and vehicles via a system that includes sensors embed- ded in the roadway and on traffic lights. This will be a part of a highly interconnected ecosystem. "An IoT-enabled traffic-monitoring system uses a combina- tion of vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure, and infra- structure-to-infrastructure communication systems and analytics to manage traffic situations…" 1 "V2X (vehicle-to-everything) communications must continu- ously capture and interpret complete data concerning the surrounding environment. Fully autonomous vehicles require all of this information to correctly execute actions such as braking or accelerating without driver assistance." 2 If all this is not enough of a challenge, there is also a short- age of highly technical ICT talent in the workforce. Our connected world is advancing faster than humans can adapt or adopt, as in the case of training, standards and best practices that could ensure interoperability. Since the 90s, statistics revealed that 70 percent of network downtime was due to cabling problems. These statistics were pre-IoT when "all" that ICT pertained to was the voice and data network. More recent statistics point to cabling problems being the cause of half of all network failures. So, there has been improvement in the industry. Rapid technological advancements and changes in how we use technology in all of life's activities make it more difficult for those uninitiated with ICT to put the need into proper perspective. "The critics cite economic evidence to argue that there are no major shortages of skilled workers. But a closer look