France Decrees New Commercial Buildings Must Be Partially Covered in Plants or Solar Panels
March 20th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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While I’d be thrilled to see more commercial buildings with plants and solar panels on top of them, I’m not so thrilled with the strong arm legislation used to get there.
On the overall scheme of things, green rooftops and solar panel systems would be trivial expenses that save companies money. Why wouldn’t they just implement them? Why does it take a government to force them to do it?
Via: Guardian:
Rooftops on new buildings built in commercial zones in France must either be partially covered in plants or solar panels, under a law approved on Thursday.
Green roofs have an isolating effect, helping reduce the amount of energy needed to heat a building in winter and cool it in summer.
They also retain rainwater, thus helping reduce problems with runoff, while favouring biodiversity and giving birds a place to nest in the urban jungle, ecologists say.
The law approved by parliament was more limited in scope than initial calls by French environmental activists to make green roofs that cover the entire surface mandatory on all new buildings.
The Socialist government convinced activists to limit the scope of the law to commercial buildings.
The law was also made less onerous for businesses by requiring only part of the roof to be covered with plants, and giving them the choice of installing solar panels to generate electricity instead.
U.S. Customs Quietly Launches Facial Recognition Experiment at DC Airport
March 20th, 2015Via: Vice:
The next time you come back from overseas and flash your American passport at Washington, DC’s Dulles airport, customs officers might take a picture of you and use facial recognition technology to figure out if you really are who you say you are.
On March 11, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) quietly rolled out a new facial recognition pilot program to help custom officers catch “imposters,” or people using a passport that isn’t theirs, an agency spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard on Wednesday.
The pilot is part of a larger effort to modernize US customs practices with the use of new technologies as part of the Apex Air Entry and E?xit Re-Engineering (AEER) Project. And it’s only the first of at least ?three experiments labeled “Targeted Biometric Operations,” according to a previously undisclosed CBP presentation obtained by Motherboard.
The goal of the pilot program, called “1:1 Facial Recognition Air Entry Pilot,” is to figure out if facial recognition can be a useful tool in catching these imposters, but civil liberties activists worry this is the first step to create a database of law-abiding Americans’ mugshots, which could create unforeseen privacy risks.
FAA Allows Amazon to Fly Drones Experimentally
March 19th, 2015Via: USA Today:
The Federal Aviation Administration approved Amazon Logistics Inc. on Thursday to fly drones experimentally.
The approval will allow the company to conduct research, development and crew training for deliveries called Amazon Prime Air.
The company is required to fly remote-controlled aircraft lower than 400 feet during daylight hours, and the pilot must have a private pilot’s certificate. Other restrictions include keeping the aircraft within view of its pilot or a partner, called a “visual observer,” and flying at least 500 feet away from people not associated with the experiments.
While Amazon is the highest-profile company to get FAA approval to fly drones commercially, the agency has granted 48 petitions through Friday for purposes such as movie-making, smokestack inspection, agriculture and aerial photography. But hundreds more applications are pending, as the industry urges faster regulatory action.
Google’s New Facial Recognition System
March 19th, 2015Via: Fortune:
New advances in facial recognition are a step forward for an artificial intelligence technique called deep learning.
“I never forget a face,” some people like to boast. It’s a claim that looks quainter by the day as artificial intelligence research continues to advance. Some computers, it turns out, never forget 260 million faces.
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As consumer robots, driverless cars and smart homes become real, deep learning will be there, too, providing the eyes, ears, and some of the brains for our new toys. DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense’s research agency, is also investigating how deep learning techniques might be able to help it make sense of the streams of communications crossing intelligence networks everyday.
Something tells me it’s looking at Google’s FaceNet and getting pretty excited, too.
Related: How The CIA Made Google
Bill Gates Warns on Future Disease Epidemic
March 19th, 2015Via: BBC:
The world needs to prepare for the next major health crisis, Bill Gates has told delegates at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.
While Ebola seems to be being kept under control currently, next time “we may not be so lucky” the Microsoft co-founder warned.
He said that there were plenty of technology tools that could be used to contain the spread of a virus.
And, he added, governments should learn from how nations prepare for war.
“Nato plays war games to check that people are well-trained and prepared. Now we need germ games,” he said.
He also called for a reserve “medical corps” similar to the reserve armies that civilians can join.
Some Northern California Farmers Not Planting This Year, Will Make More Money Selling Water to Los Angeles
March 19th, 2015Via: CBS:
The rice industry in the Sacramento Valley is taking a hard hit with the drought. Some farmers are skipping out on their fields this year, because they are cashing in on their water rights.
Oil Supplies Hit 80-Year High
March 18th, 2015Via: Yahoo:
WTI crude (CLJ15.NYM) prices are taking another leg down, hovering at the $42 a barrel level after the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that “U.S. crude oil inventories are at the highest level for this time of year in at least the last 80 years.”
EIA reported commercial crude inventories increased by 9.6 million barrels from the previous week. Now at 458.5 million barrels. This follows a huge inventory build of 10.5 million barrels, reported late Tuesday by the American Petroleum Institute. Analysts were expecting just 3.5 million.
Change We Can Believe In: U.S. Sets New Record for Denying Federal Files Under Freedom of Information Act
March 18th, 2015Via: Guardian:
The US has set a new record for denying and censoring federal files under the Freedom of Information Act, analysis by the Associated Press reveals.
For the second consecutive year, the Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them under the open-government legislation.
The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
It also acknowledged in nearly one in three cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law – but only when it was challenged.
Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55% to more than 200,000.
Women-Led Companies Perform Three Times Better Than the S&P 500
March 17th, 2015Via: Fortune:
Boston-based Quantopian looked at how well Fortune 1000 companies led by women performed compared to the S&P 500 over a 12-year period.
You’ve heard that companies with women executives at the helm tend to perform better than those led by men— and a new study furthers that claim, finding that women CEOs in the Fortune 1000 drive three times the returns as S&P 500 enterprises run predominantly by men.
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Here’s how the simulation works: Rubin invests a hypothetical $100,000 in the companies that had women CEOs between Jan. 1, 2002 and Dec. 31, 2014 and another $100,000 in the S&P 500. Rubin buys a company’s stock when the woman becomes CEO, and holds it through the CEO’s tenure.
According to the algorithm, the women CEO fund would end up being worth $448,158, or a return of 348%, while the S&P 500 investment would have risen to $222,306, or a return of 122 %. The results are even on the conservative side for the performance of the women CEOs, since dividends weren’t reinvested automatically as they were with the S&P 500.
Makani: Google’s Energy Harvesting Kites
March 17th, 2015Via: Google:
Makani is working to accelerate the shift to clean, renewable energy by developing energy kites, a new type of wind turbine that uses lightweight electronics, advanced materials, and smart software to generate more energy with less materials—all at lower cost.
