Hands Off the Wheel!

Lippincott Librarians sense trends as we help Penn students, faculty and staff dig for industry research, articles and data. In 2014, I worked with students researching machine vision and self-driving cars, and over the years, I have seen an increasing number of questions about the industry and technologies behind it. In 2019, I helped a student research Nuro, the Mountain View, California based robot delivery van company that has reached unicorn status, as reported in Inc. Just this week, Crunchbase reported that Uber is in talks for a $1B funding round for their self-driving car unit, a testament to how far businesses in this industry have come. As librarians, we observe industry life cycles through the support we offer to Penn.

Knowledge@Wharton recently featured a podcast with engineer Samuel I. Schwartz, author of No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future, a book available through Van Pelt Library.

If you are interested in learning more about the autonomous vehicle space, Lippincott Library and the Penn Libraries have resources beyond books, useful for researching emerging industries.

How to Fact-Check your President, Professor, or Peer

Think about your last friendly debate, mind-blowing lecture, or presidential tweet. Did someone make a quantitative claim that seemed hard to believe? If you can gather the data, you have the power to check the facts and come to your own evidence-based conclusion.

Let’s take an example: In the 2019 State of the Union Address, President Donald Trump stated, “the United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.”