I am a forty-five-year-old journalist who, for many years, didn't read the news. In high school, I knew about events like the O. J. Simpson trial and the Oklahoma City bombing, but not much else. In college, I was friends with geeky economics majors who read The Economist, but I'm pretty sure I never actually turned on CNN or bought a paper at the newsstand. I read novels, and magazines like Wired and Spin. If I went online, it wasn't to check the front page of the Times but to browse record reviews from College Music Journal. Somehow, during this time, I thought of myself as well informed.

Robot umpires have been given a promotion and will be just one step from the major leagues this season. Major League Baseball is expanding its automated strike zone experiment to Triple-A, the highest level of the minor leagues. MLB's website posted a hiring notice seeking seasonal employees to operate the Automated Ball and Strike system. MLB said it is recruiting employees to operate the system for the Albuquerque Isotopes, Charlotte Knights, El Paso Chihuahuas, Las Vegas Aviators, Oklahoma City Dodgers, Reno Aces, Round Rock Express, Sacramento River Cats, Salt Lake Bees, Sugar Land Skeeters and Tacoma Rainiers. The independent Atlantic League became the first American professional league to let a computer call balls and strikes at its All-Star Game in July 2019 and experimented with ABS during the second half of that season. It also was used in the Arizona Fall League for top prospects in 2019, drawing complaints of its calls on breaking balls.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Robotic umpires that use an automated system for determining ball and strike calls will now be used in Triple-A baseball for the 2022 season, MLB officials announced. This puts the Automated Ball and Strike (ABS) system, which has seen success after experimental adoption by some ballparks in the minor leagues, just one level below the major leagues. MLB'S SNAIL-PACED LOCKOUT TALKS TO RESUME WITH UNION OFFER MLB is currently seeking personnel to operate the system at ballparks for the Albuquerque Isotopes, Charlotte Knights, El Paso Chihuahuas, Las Vegas Aviators, Oklahoma City Dodgers, Reno Aces, Round Rock Express, Sacramento River Cats, Salt Lake Bees, Sugar Land Skeeters and Tacoma Rainiers, FOX 13 of Seattle reported.

Every day across Australia, truckies are driving thousands of kilometres to get fresh produce from farms to markets. But what if the truck could do this job, without a driver? The NASDAQ-listed company TuSimple is celebrating a milestone, after transporting watermelons from Arizona to Oklahoma City using an autonomous truck. There were two humans in the truck during the trial -- and they did take control of the vehicle at the front and back end of the journey -- but for more than 1,500 kilometres, the truck was driving itself. "Our business case is to take the human driver out," TuSimple's Jim Mullen said.

There are dozens of routes that Alaska Airlines Flight 1405 can take from Oklahoma City to Seattle, and dispatcher Brad Ward zeroed in on what he thought was the best one, taking into account weather, wind speeds, and other air traffic. But his new colleague at the Alaska Airlines operations center had other thoughts. A storm cell near Oklahoma City was likely to turn into a thunderstorm around the time Flight 1405 took off, and the airspace north of Amarillo would be closed for military exercises. Better to reroute, the young colleague said, suggesting an alternative that Ward admitted was safer and more efficient. The entire conversation lasted just seconds and passed without a word being spoken: a red box lit up on Ward's computer screen when the colleague, an artificial intelligence program he has affectionately nicknamed Algo, had an idea.

There's a long-running line of children's books where you provide the kid's details – name, age, favourite hobbies – and they all get mail-merged into the narrative, making the youngster the central character in their own story and providing the illusion of personalisation at a low cost. Ready Player Two, the sequel to the hugely popular Ready Player One, offers a similar experience. Like its predecessor, it's a tedious slog through arcane pop culture references – The Silmarillion, the music of Prince, the movies of John Hughes – sprinkled in so lazily that you could replace them with your own favourites, or swap them right out and be left with a much shorter, and probably better book. The action picks up immediately after the events of Ready Player One, which is set in the near-future, in a world where vast swathes of the population spend most of their day living inside a virtual reality simulation called the OASIS, to escape from the poverty, crime and general awfulness of life on Earth. The protagonist, Wade Watts, is a nerdy teenager living in the'stacks' outside Oklahoma City – a shanty-town comprised of literal stacks of trailers and RVs – who devotes all of his time to an in-OASIS treasure hunt devised by billionaire James Halliday, the late co-creator of the simulation, as a Willy Wonka-esque means to find an heir to his fortune.

With more than 40 years of experience in the healthcare IT space, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System CIO Avery Cloud has seen the value technology brings to healthcare. Some of Mr. Cloud's most memorable moments as CIO at the Baton Rouge, La.-based health system revolve around technology's effect on physicians and patients, ranging from instances when it helped prevent a clinical error to reducing patient anxiety. Prior to joining Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System, Mr. Cloud served as vice president of innovation and technology at CHI St. Luke's Health in Houston as well as CIO at Wilmington, N.C.-based New Hanover Regional Medical Center and Integris Health in Oklahoma City. Here, Mr. Cloud shares his strategy to build and encourage innovation among staff members. Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

The nature of basketball is such that its most cathartic moment--when the ball goes decisively and irretrievably through the hoop--is the same every time. The ball piercing the basket is both a discrete event and a continuous waterfall of motion that, for active players, is constant throughout their careers. They shoot in practice, they shoot in the game, they shoot and shoot and shoot. The motion becomes so ingrained in their muscle memory that the gesture requires only its activation; everything else--the elevation, the aiming at the basket, the cocking of the elbow and the follow-through of the hand--is programmed. I found myself thinking about the waterfall of shots in the wake of one of the more dramatic ones in recent N.B.A. history: Damian Lillard, of the Portland Trail Blazers, hitting the game-winning, series-ending shot against the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game Five.

The race to commercialize autonomous last-mile delivery is heating up. First grocery giant Kroger's announced it will test driverless delivery using vehicles from Nuro, a self-driving startup founded by two ex-Google engineers. Then, just a couple weeks ago, unsung outlier AutoX, which is run by a man actually called Professor X, leapfrogged the pack by announcing it will soon start real-world L4 autonomous delivery in San Jose. Now Udelv, which boasts the first-ever successful autonomous delivery on public roads, a milestone it passed in January that was covered mostly in the trades, has inked a deal to supply Oklahoma's largest chain of local grocery stores. The deal initially includes 10 customized autonomous delivery vans (ADVs) to fulfill online orders from Oklahoma City metro area stores like Uptown Grocery, Buy For Less, and Smart Saver.

Next year, Oklahoma City residents will be able to have their groceries delivered to them by an autonomous vehicle. Udelv announced this week that a new partnership will bring its self-driving delivery vehicles to the city's largest local chain of grocery stores, which includes supermarkets such as Uptown Grocery, Buy For Less, Buy For Less Super Mercado and Smart Saver. Ten vehicles are scheduled to be delivered to the stores by the end of June 2019. Udelv made its first delivery with the vehicles in California this January, and since then, it has completed more than 700 deliveries in partnership with a handful of merchants in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company and its Oklahoma City parter Esperanza Real Estate Investments will work with city authorities ahead of the vehicles' deployment and Oklahoma's Secretary of Transportation, Mike Patterson, said in a statement that the state has a regulatory group in place focusing on the use of autonomous delivery vehicle technology.