Amazon Is Hauling Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks Developed by Embark
January 30th, 2019Via: CNBC:
Amazon is using self-driving trucks developed by Embark to haul some cargo on the I-10 interstate highway, CNBC has learned.
The trucks were previously noticed by a Reddit user, who photographed and shared images this week showing tractors emblazoned with the Embark logo and trailers painted with the Amazon Prime logo.
Meth and Murder: Tijuana Is One of the Deadliest Cities on Earth
January 30th, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times:
Tijuana, a city of 1.8 million that not long ago was celebrating a major reduction in violence, is in the grip of an unprecedented homicide crisis.
A record 2,518 people were killed here in 2018 — nearly seven times the total in 2012. With 140 killings per 100,000 people, Tijuana is now one of the deadliest cities in the world.
Across the border in San Diego, there were 34 homicides last year, or just over 2 killings per 100,000 people.
The root cause of the bloodshed is fundamentally different from previous iterations of violence in Tijuana.
In the past, the body count was driven by powerful drug cartels battling over lucrative trafficking routes to the United States. Now the main cause is competition in a growing local drug trade, with low-level dealers sometimes dying over the right to sell drugs on a single street corner.
Local and state officials estimate that up to 90% of the city’s homicides are linked to local drug sales, and authorities say they are seeing a similar pattern in Juarez, Cancun and other Mexican cities at the forefront of a nationwide rise in killings, which have nearly doubled over the last three years.
“We’re at war,” said Jesus Escajadillo, a medical examiner at Tijuana’s morgue, who one morning last summer was stooped over a tattooed body in a Lakers jersey, using forceps to dig out the bullet that had destroyed the man’s face. “We are living through a civil war.”
Smart Coolers: Now Your Groceries See You, Too
January 30th, 2019Via: The Atlantic:
Walgreens is piloting a new line of “smart coolers”—fridges equipped with cameras that scan shoppers’ faces and make inferences on their age and gender. On January 14, the company announced its first trial at a store in Chicago in January, and plans to equip stores in New York and San Francisco with the tech.
Demographic information is key to retail shopping. Retailers want to know what people are buying, segmenting shoppers by gender, age, and income (to name a few characteristics) and then targeting them precisely. To that end, these smart coolers are a marvel.
If, for example, Pepsi launched an ad campaign targeting young women, it could use smart-cooler data to see if its campaign was working. These machines can draw all kinds of useful inferences: Maybe young men buy more Sprite if it’s displayed next to Mountain Dew. Maybe older women buy more ice cream on Thursday nights than any other day of the week. The tech also has “iris tracking” capabilities, meaning the company can collect data on which displayed items are the most looked at.
Crucially, the “Cooler Screens” system does not use facial recognition. Shoppers aren’t identified when the fridge cameras scan their face. Instead, the cameras analyze faces to make inferences about shoppers’ age and gender. First, the camera takes their picture, which an AI system will measure and analyze, say, the width of someone’s eyes, the distance between their lips and nose, and other micro measurements. From there, the system can estimate if the person who opened the door is, say, a woman in her early 20s or a male in his late 50s. It’s analysis, not recognition.
Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans to Package and Sell Location Data on Millions of Cellphones
January 29th, 2019Ah… It de-identifies the location of cellphone users.
Mmm hmm.
Via: The Intercept:
Most of the data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that.
The program, known as Replica, offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city’s patterns of movement. Like “SimCity,” Replica’s “user-friendly” tool deploys statistical simulations to give a comprehensive view of how, when, and where people travel in urban areas. It’s an appealing prospect for planners making critical decisions about transportation and land use. In recent months, transportation authorities in Kansas City, Portland, and the Chicago area have signed up to glean its insights. The only catch: They’re not completely sure where the data is coming from.
Typical urban planners rely on processes like surveys and trip counters that are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and outdated. Replica, instead, uses real-time mobile location data. As Nick Bowden of Sidewalk Labs has explained, “Replica provides a full set of baseline travel measures that are very difficult to gather and maintain today, including the total number of people on a highway or local street network, what mode they’re using (car, transit, bike, or foot), and their trip purpose (commuting to work, going shopping, heading to school).”
To make these measurements, the program gathers and de-identifies the location of cellphone users, which it obtains from unspecified third-party vendors. It then models this anonymized data in simulations — creating a synthetic population that faithfully replicates a city’s real-world patterns but that “obscures the real-world travel habits of individual people,” as Bowden told The Intercept.
The program comes at a time of growing unease with how tech companies use and share our personal data — and raises new questions about Google’s encroachment on the physical world.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner: Obama Spoke at Boeing Retreat After Firm Gave Millions to Library Fund
January 28th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
Boeing Co. lined up a surprise motivational speaker for an executive retreat in Arizona this month: former U.S. President Barack Obama.
He was the second former U.S. president in two years to offer up leadership tips to managers gathered for Boeing’s annual desert planning session. George W. Bush addressed the group last year, said people familiar with the matter.
While guest speakers are staples of corporate getaways this time of year, inviting former world leaders to inspire employees is unusual. That had been true at Boeing, too. Its change reflects the corporate ties that linger after a president leaves office — along with the planemaker’s swagger as it’s taken over the mantle from General Electric Co. as the largest U.S. industrial company.
U.S. Military Eyes Tiny Nuclear Reactors for Deployed Troops
January 28th, 2019Via: DefenseOne:
Getting fuel to remote operating bases is a big problem for the U.S. military. In 2008, during the height of combat in Iraq, the Government Accountability Office estimated that more than 900,000 gallons of fuel went to bases for basic power needs like lighting and refrigeration (on top of the 6.7 million gallons the military burned that year in jets and ground vehicles.) The U.S. military’s Strategic Capabilities Office has put out a request for information about small nuclear reactors that could deploy to the sorts of hillside forward bases U.S. troops set up in places like Afghanistan.
According to the request for “Project Dilithium,” the reactor should fit on a truck and a C-17 aircraft and generate from one to 10 megawatts of electric power for three years without refueling. Soldiers have to be able to stand it up in 72 hours and take it down in a week. It’s got to be meltdown-proof. The office is looking to fund three different prototype designs and will then select a winner from among them.
Frozen Doom? Antibiotic-Resistant Superbug Genes Found in the Arctic
January 28th, 2019Hmm.
Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO Giants Know Something We Don’t:
No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).
On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the “doomsday seed bank.” Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.
Via: Russia Today:
In an extremely worrying development, genes relating to one of the most antibiotic resistant superbugs known to mankind have been found in the soil of the high Arctic, a remote and largely inhospitable corner of the world.
The New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 genes (blaNDM-1) were first identified when a Swedish patient of Indian origin, who traveled to India in 2008, presented at a Delhi hospital. The genes were then detected in surface water on Delhi streets in 2010.
In a shock development, they have now been unearthed in the soil in Svalbard, Norway, high up in the Arctic Circle, 12,870km away from the Indian city, and how they got there is a profound mystery.
DNA was extracted from 40 soil samples at eight locations in Svalbard and a total of 131 antibiotic resistant genes were found. The New Delhi superbug was present in over 60 percent of the samples analyzed. The impact of antibiotic-resistant bacteria cannot be overstated, regardless of the lack of a coherent, international strategy at present.
Gene Modified Chickens ‘Lay Medicines’
January 28th, 2019Via: BBC:
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute have genetically modified chickens to produce human proteins in their eggs.
They hope the project will one day lead to lifesaving drugs that are much cheaper to make.
The team modified the genomes of the chickens so their eggs contain large amounts of high quality proteins.
Just three eggs contain a clinically significant dose, according to the scientists.
Initially the proteins will be used in research but laboratory tests have already found they work at least as well as equivalent drugs.
Protein-based therapies such as the cancer treatments Herceptin and Avastin can be effective where traditional drugs fail but they are highly expensive.
The new research – a collaboration between the institute and the university’s spinout company Roslin Technologies – holds out the promise of a far cheaper production process.
Another EV Giant Enters The Battery Business
January 27th, 2019Via: OilPrice.com:
German auto maker giant Volkswagen has just upped its bet on electric vehicles (EVs) by announcing it will begin manufacturing batteries and charging stations for those cars, which the company plans to also start mass producing soon.
The Wolfsburg-based company said it would invest 870 million euros (about $985 million) by 2020 to develop e-vehicle components, adding that its components division, which makes engines and steering parts, will now be in charge of producing, packing and overseeing recycling of battery cells and packs.
Army’s Long-Awaited Iraq War Study Finds Iran Was the Only Winner
January 27th, 2019The arms industry and the mercs did ok, too.
Via: ArmyTimes:
A two-volume Army study of the Iraq war is a deep examination of the mistakes and success of the war effort that also takes aim at critics who would slough off the conflict as they shift to near-peer threats.
The study, commissioned by former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno in 2013 and continued under current chief Gen. Mark Milley, was delayed for release since 2016, when it was completed. Some said it was due to concerns over airing “dirty laundry” about decisions made by some leaders during the conflict.
The 1,300-page, two volume history, complete with more than 1,000 declassified documents, spans the 2003 invasion through the U.S. withdrawal, the rise of ISIS, and the influence of Syria and Iran.
“At the time of this project’s completion in 2018, an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor,” authors wrote in the concluding chapter.
