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The Samsung Galaxy S8 has a random reboot problem and nobody knows why http://ift.tt/2oFYIzz With the launch of any new tech product — especially one as unique and innovative as Samsung’s Galaxy S8 — there are bound to be some hiccups. Since the phone’s launch last week, we have heard about some of them, relating to red-tinted displays and wireless charging. Now, it seems a growing number of users are running into a more serious issue: Random reboots. A thread on Samsung’s Community help forum — first called attention to by Android Authority — reveals pages of replies from owners of Samsung’s latest flagship reporting restarts that seemingly occur out of nowhere. What is more, many of these are not infrequent instances; the individual who opened the thread reports seven reboots in the first 10 hours, while another estimates it has happened to them about a dozen times in the past week. The video below depicts four reboots in three minutes, looping one after another so quickly that the owner is unable to unlock the device before they occur. Some users who have been able to get back into their phones have reported reorganized home screens. As a result, many have tried hard resets and returning their devices to factory settings. While those methods have provided relief for a few individuals, they do not appear to be working for everyone. Several customers have complained of exchanging their phones through their carrier or retailer, only to find that the issue still persists on the new device. There is speculation as to what might be causing the reboots, with no obvious culprit. It appears that, for some, the issue is accompanied by the Galaxy S8 having difficulty carrying over contents on an inserted microSD card. Some believe that particular apps or data might be incompatible or corrupted — though without an official statement from Samsung at the time of this writing, everything we have to go on now is conjecture. Has your new Galaxy S8 been plagued by random reboots? If so, how and when are they happening? Have you been able to remedy the situation? Sound off in the comments and let us know.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/mG1NBn April 28, 2017 at 06:45AM
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Watch how Elon Musk’s Boring Company tunnels will move cars faster http://ift.tt/2pGQGGq VIDEO Just what does Elon Musk’s Boring Company want to accomplish? This might be our clearest picture yet – a video shown during Musk’s TEDTalk from Friday morning, which includes a rendering of a future underground transit network where cars travel on criss-crossing layers of tunnels that include sleds shuttling vehicles around on rails at around 130 mph. Musk’s vision includes parking spots that are actually elevator shaft entrances, where drivers can pull in and descend to the network below. Once underground, the car will travel along in a sled, merging with other tunnels and being integrated seamlessly into a network that includes other packets, all controlled by computer for maximum efficiency. Traveling in this way will allow speeds to exceed what’s possible on the surface, and result in network optimization of routing that’s not unlike what happens with packets of data in a broadband communications network powering the Internet today. Developing… Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com April 28, 2017 at 06:34AM
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China Is Racing Ahead of the US in the Quest to Cure Cancer With CRISPR http://ift.tt/2pq09yX On Friday, a team of Chinese scientists used the cutting-edge gene-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 on humans for the second time in history, injecting a cancer patient with modified human genes in hopes of vanquishing the disease. Advertisement In the US, the first planned trials to use CRISPR in people still have not gotten under way. But in China, things appear to be moving relatively quickly. Last fall, a team at Sichuan University’s West China Hospital used CRISPR for the first time on an adult with lung cancer. In the new trial, reported by The Wall Street Journal, altered genes were injected into a patient with a rare type of head and neck cancer, called nasopharyngeal carcinoma, at Nanjing University’s Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital. Advertisement The aim is to use CRISPR, which allows scientists to snip out pieces of DNA with greater ease than older gene-editing techniques, to suppress the activity of a gene preventing the patient’s body from effectively fighting the disease. On Friday, the university announced that the first patient had received an infusion of altered cells, which are taken from their body and altered in a lab before being injected back in. In all, 20 patients with gastric cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma and lymphoma are expected to participate in the trial. Its first phase is expected to conclude next year. The other Chinese trial, in which scientists modified immune cells to attack lung cancer in 11 patients, expects to release results this year, according to the Journal. Sponsored The first US human CRISPR trial is slated to begin this summer at the University of Pennsylvania, after receiving a regulatory stamp of approval to proceed last year. In that trial, scientists plan to genetically alter patients’ immune cells to attack three different kinds of cancer. Clearly, a race to cure cancer with CRISPR is underfoot. And right now at least, China seems to be winning. Advertisement Advertisement Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com April 28, 2017 at 06:33AM
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Weekly Roundup: FCC’s plan to revoke net neutrality, Uber defends tracking practices http://ift.tt/2oQEQF9 Two new unicorns are born, Uber faces two lawsuits, and the FCC unveils its proposal to revoke net neutrality. These are the top tech stories you need to know this week, and you can sign up to receive this post as a newsletter delivered to your inbox on Saturdays. 1. FCC details plan to roll back net neutrality rules FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, newly appointed by President Trump, announced his intention to rescind the net neutrality rules created by the agency’s 2015 Open Internet Order. He called the 2015 Open Internet Order “an aberration” that “puts the federal government at the center of the internet.” The agency enacted a preemptive strike against critics with a “Myth Vs. Facts” sheet, which we’ve torn apart here. Want to say something to the FCC about all this? Here’s how to make your voice heard. 2. Uber defends tracking techniques and is hit with ‘Hell’ lawsuit Uber pushed back on allegations that it tracked former users even after they deleted the app from their iPhones. The practice, called fingerprinting, even earned CEO Travis Kalanick a scolding from Tim Cook. Uber claims the tracking is a common industry practice used to prevent fraud. We saw this one coming. Uber was also hit with a lawsuit regarding its “Hell” program that was reportedly used to track Lyft drivers. The plaintiff, Michael Gonzales, drove for Lyft during the time Uber allegedly used the software. He’s seeking $5 million in a class action lawsuit. 3. Uber must hand over information about its acquisition of Otto to Waymo In the latest in the Waymo vs. Uber lawsuit, a court ruled that Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of the legal battle, must turn over information about Uber’s acquisition of Otto to Waymo. But Waymo operations haven’t been distracted by the case. The company began its first on-demand self-driving service test in Arizona. 4. Robinhood has joined the unicorn club The zero-free stock-trading startup confirmed that it has raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation led by DST Global. “Our investors are saying ‘we haven’t ever seen a finance company that’s managed to grow like an Internet company,’ ” says Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt. 5. Quora becomes the unicorn of subjective human knowledge After eight years carefully cultivating an intelligent question and answer community, Quora raised an $85 million Series D round co-led by Collaborative Fund and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. The two big drivers of the rapid value increase have been user growth and positive early results from its ad tests. 6. Gett confirms acquisition of Juno More consolidation in the ride-sharing space occurred as on-demand ride sharing company Gett bought Juno for $200 million. The deal will bring on all of Juno’s existing business, from its network of licensed drivers through to its employees and founding team. 7. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, GoPro and Twitter report earnings Amazon blew past expectations and AWS saw substantial growth, accounting for $3.7 billion for the quarter. Alphabet also beat expectations, showing that hardware and cloud bets are paying off as the company extends beyond search. Microsoft met expectations with $23.6 billion in revenue, with Azure revenue up 93%. GoPro’s financials improved due to the Karma drone and some cost reductions. Twitter, which desperately needed a Q1 hit, somehow managed to deliver despite decreasing user growth and declining business. Weekend reads Chromebook sales are soaring, but Apple and Microsoft are fighting back: For the most part, companies are taking different but overlapping approaches to getting computing devices in the hands of students. For the time being, Google has won the battle for market share with the Chromebook, but the war is far from over. How to make Twitter profitable: For better and sometimes for worse, Twitter is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. Twitter has arguably played a critical role in at least two of the defining political upheavals of our era: The Arab Spring and the election of a political outsider, Donald Trump, as president of the United States. Here’s one person’s proposal to monetize Twitter. Who will be the Pixar of augmented reality? In the wake of Facebook’s launch of a new AR Camera Effects platform, the augmented reality space is going to drastically change. While the platform appears easy to use, venture capitalists might be wise to take a few swings at ex-Disney or DreamWorks employees building AR startups.
Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com April 28, 2017 at 06:32AM
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Stealth Key is a 3D-printed titanium key that is virtually impossible to copy http://ift.tt/2pcYiiJ The idea that you might surreptitiously snap a photo of someone’s house key and use this to create your own duplicate to break into their home sounds like something you might see in a James Bond movie. So too does a 3D-printed titanium solution, which hides its security features inside, thereby rendering it unscannable. In fact, the so-called Stealth Key is the creation of Swiss company UrbanAlps, which figured out a way to use additive manufacturing to make keys that keep their teeth concealed from view. The result is an alternative to regular, run-of-the-mill keys that can be easily scanned and copied. “It is made using 3D-metal printing, or more precisely selective laser melting,” company co-founder Alejandro Ojeda told Digital Trends. “Thanks to this approach, we can make complex internal structures that are hidden, to block 3D-scanning of the mechanical code. It is a very simple approach, but one of the most effective ones. If such keys were to be produced using traditional manufacturing it would be impossible or at least very expensive. However, thanks to 3D-metal printing it’s cost effective. Each single key printed is different, even in batches of 850 at the same time. It represents a disruption, both product-wise and manufacturing-wise.” Ojeda said he started working on the Stealth Key following work in the research and development department of a gas turbine company, where he used 3D-metal printing to invent new turbine parts with increased internal complexity. He then left the company to do a Ph.D. in lasers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology before turning his attention to the idea of developing an unbreakable key. “The first proof-of-concept was rather bulky, but it worked and we have made amazing progress since then,” he continued. “The real challenge is not so much designing the key, but the cylinder to read the key internals. Reliability is one of the main reasons why mechanical cylinders are still dominant — with 90 percent of market share — despite the existence of electronic locks. People take mechanical cylinders for granted, but these genius mechanisms work for 20 to 30 years without a single fault — something electronic systems cannot provide. And there is no battery to change, either.” Costing around $200, a pair of Stealth Keys and a cylinder lock mechanism is not the cheapest option out there, although it is not dissimilar in price to other high-security systems boasting high-grade cylinders. But if there is one thing it is worth splurging on, it is the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your home is safe. After all, you never know when a Swiss mastermind with a Ph.D. in lasers and a portable 3D scanner will want to try and break in!
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/mG1NBn April 28, 2017 at 06:17AM
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Nintendo debuts Helix, a flubber-like, lab-created ‘Arms’ character http://ift.tt/2pGIR3T One of the four Arms characters that eagle-eyed fans spotted in a recent Nintendo Direct has now been officially unveiled. It’s called Helix and it’s not a robot as once thought, but a gelatinous humanoid with a retro pixel display for eyes and a funky, ’90s color scheme hairdo. Arms has a variety of wacky characters set to be playable at the game’s launch in June, but while we’ve seen a number of them already, there are still some yet to be unveiled. One of them was Helix, who has its own thematic arena, as well as a unique playstyle. Being made of a Flubber-like material, Helix is capable of stretching itself tall or plopping itself down into a blob on the floor to stay out of harm’s way. According to the description on its debut video, Helix was created in an Arms laboratory, with those mad scientists looking to create the ultimate Arms combatant. A stretchy body certainly has its uses. Along with its interesting body type, Helix comes with some unique abilities, ranging from its dragon-themed super punches to the Splatoony-way its water-balloon fists explode during its special attack. Even Helix’s movement is different from its contemporaries, flopping and flowing around the arena rather than boosting and dodging. It’s not obvious from the video, but it seems likely that Helix will stray more toward the speedier end of the character spectrum, in contrast to some of the heavies which are more focused on doing outright damage than on being maneuverable. Still, as different as Helix is from the other brawlers in Arms, it shares the same slinky arms, the same outrageously rad color scheme for its hair and arms, and the same silly feel, which should mean it fits right in with the rest of the Arms crew. Helix will debut alongside the likes of Minmin and Spring Man when Arms launches on June 16.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/mG1NBn April 28, 2017 at 06:17AM
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‘The Circle’ review http://ift.tt/2qfu2Cl
Films and television series that explore the tug-of-war between personal privacy and connectivity typically do so with a hefty dose of nuance and concessions to the gray area between these opposing elements. TV shows like Black Mirror and Mr. Robot show us the danger of taking an all-or-nothing approach to technology, but without feeling overly preachy or too much like a bitter old man shaking his fist at modern conveniences. An adaptation of Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel of the same name, The Circle casts Emma Watson as a fresh-faced new employee at a powerful tech company that has raised social networking to a level of ubiquity – and necessity – far beyond that of our own Facebook or Google. The company known as The Circle is led by its charismatic co-founder Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) and his business-minded partner, Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt). Emma Watson’s Mae Holland quickly rises through the corporate ranks after she has an experience with the company’s tech that goes viral and she finds herself thrust into the spotlight. As one might expect, Mae finds that her willingness to go above and beyond to embrace the company’s pursuit of an always-on, always-connected society is fraught with risks – both for her and her loved ones, and for the greater world outside her social network. From the very start, The Circle makes its intentions clear in frustratingly obvious ways that leave little room for nuance. At no point is there any confusion about who the heroes and villains are in this story, with The Circle corporation aggressively positioned as an evil invader of privacy that hides its nefarious intentions behind promises of positive social change. Hanks and Oswalt rarely feel invested in their characters, and rather than give them a sense of depth that would make the audience feel conflicted about the pair’s willingness to test the boundaries of freedom and social accountability, the film casts them as relatively simple, black-hat bad guys – and not especially convincing ones at that. These missed opportunities end up being a recurring problem with the film, which also doesn’t do Watson any favors as its leading lady. Over the course of the movie, Watson’s character goes from overworked, underpaid call-center peon to a figure who could very well determine the future of social connectivity in human civilization, but you wouldn’t know it by the evolution her character undergoes – or doesn’t undergo, in this case – on the screen. The absence of any convincing, dramatic growth in her character is compounded by how often the movie relies on having Mae tell her family or friends about the emotions she’s feeling in video calls, making her evolution feel like it could just as easily be another aspect of the online persona she’s developed for herself. The end result is a character that never feels truly, authentically involved in the events happening around her, making the rest of the film feel as frustratingly shallow as its protagonist. On the positive side, Guardians of the Galaxy actress Karen Gillan provides one of the better performances in the film. Her character – Mae’s friend, who gets her the job at The Circle – experiences the most pronounced change in the film, and her shift from true believer to burned-out skeptic to a sort of middle-ground, self-aware, rational participant in The Circle’s global social network is the most distinct evolution of any character in the movie. Gillan’s performance isn’t enough to make up for the underwhelming roles played by Watson, Hanks, and Oswalt, though, and especially not the criminal underuse of John Boyega. The Star Wars: The Force Awakens actor plays a role that wavers between being Mae’s love interest, mentor, and enigmatic co-conspirator, but never seems to settle on what it wants to be. Boyega ends up spending most of his screen time staring at his phone, which seems like exceptionally poor use of a talented actor. Given how many movies and television series have given tech privacy issues more textured, carefully considered treatment, it’s difficult not to feel disappointed in The Circle and what it fails to achieve with its talented cast. At nearly every opportunity, it takes the easy route, and offers up an entirely predictable, all-too-safe story that holds few surprises, and even fewer reasons to give its themes any thought.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/mG1NBn April 28, 2017 at 06:17AM
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DT Daily: Nintendo’s New 2DS XL signals new life for the 3DS line http://ift.tt/2oQIbUp Nintendo just announced yet another new gaming system: The New 2DS XL. Unlike the original 2DS, which is best known for resembling a slice of cake, the New 2DS XL features the clamshell design found on the more expensive 3DS. The announcement of a new mobile console is a bit of a surprise and certainly signals Nintendo’s commitment to continue the 3DS family of handheld systems. Many thought the Nintendo Switch would replace the 3DS entirely, especially if Nintendo continues to hone the hardware. But for now Nintendo insists the 3DS and Switch will remain separate but equal. The New 2DS XL will launch in North America July 28, for 150 bucks. After watching Amazon’s stunning success with the Alexa enabled Echo speaker line, Apple may finally be moving toward the launch of its own Echo like device. This claim comes in a tweet from blogger Sonny Dickson, a guy who over the years has called it right with a number of Apple leaks. Dickson states the Alexa competitor is expected to be marketed as a Siri/AirPlay device and may feature a touchscreen. The blogger added that the product may carry some form of Beats technology and run a variant of iOS. There have long been rumors that Apple is looking to build Siri into a piece of hardware similar to the Echo, and it could be gearing up to unveil it in the coming months. In 2015, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint eliminated subsidized phone pricing — the discounts on devices offered in exchange for two-year commitments. Now T-Mobile may be bringing them back. According to leaked documents obtained by Android Authority, T-Mobile will launch a service that reduces the price of top-tier phones like the Galaxy S8 and iPhone 7, which often retail for more than $650. But it won’t be a contract deal — the marketing materials say its “commitment free” — and it’ll come with a lifetime warranty and insurance included. How T-Mobile will cover the cost of this unicorn of a subsidy is still unclear. That’s all we have for this week. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you Monday on DT Daily.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/mG1NBn April 28, 2017 at 06:17AM
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What General Motors Did To Flint http://ift.tt/2pcGfJr Before its faucets ran brown, before its residents were poisoned by lead, before it was Murdertown USA, Flint, Michigan was Vehicle City. Advertisement Everyone in Flint has a story about General Motors. Flint is where GM was born more than 100 years ago. It rose a GM company town, home to scores of car plants in the area over the decades. It boomed in GM’s earliest years before World War II, saw the creation of the modern auto labor movement, and for decades was a place where working class people could find good-paying jobs. But Flint fell alongside GM too, both as plants closed and jobs moved overseas and the city’s own tax base eroded when GM moved outside Flint proper to its suburbs—moves subsidized by Flint itself for the sake of its largest and most vital employer. In building a city around GM to thrive, Flint laid the foundation for the conditions of the city’s water crisis—which began three years ago this week—to explode. Advertisement And emails obtained by Jalopnik through open records requests show GM’s water problems were far more extensive than previously disclosed, including issues at its assembly plant in the city that have gone unreported until now. Gladyes Williamson has stories about GM too. The 63-year-old Buick retiree’s stories are about how her Flint house is now nearly worthless, how her hair fell out, and how her own grandchildren won’t come see her anymore for fear of being poisoned. “This is about poverty and the working class man, and this is about General Motors leaving Flint in a catastrophic situation that caused all of this,” she told me in a recent interview. In 2011, with Flint, Michigan in a financially precarious place, Gov. Rick Snyder appointed someone to run the Rust Belt city, usurping its democratically elected officials through a state law that gave him the power to do so. That appointee, direly called an “emergency manager,” decided to save money by switching the city’s drinking water source from Lake Huron to the highly corrosive Flint River as a temporary measure to save about $2 million annually. Advertisement Sponsored The plan, however, was haphazardly organized. Regulators didn’t properly treat the water, thereby allowing the corrosive river to leach lead off water service lines and taint the supply by the time it reached homes across the city. You’ve probably heard that story. At this point it’s hard not to be at least somewhat familiar with the Flint water crisis. Advertisement Here’s a story you may not have heard: in May 2014, just weeks after Michigan switched Flint’s drinking water source to the polluted river, a significant problem had emerged at GM’s facilities in town. The same water supply wreaking havoc on people’s lives—rancid odors, abhorrent discoloration, high levels of bacteria, and a god-awful taste—was also corroding parts at GM’s engine plant in town and causing significant issues at the automaker’s nearby assembly factory. For GM, the water at its engine factory had become so problematic by October 2014 that it successfully persuaded officials to allow it to switch back to the previous source, the one provided by the city of Detroit. (GM’s assembly and stamping plants in town reportedly stayed on the Flint river, despite noticeable issues at the assembly plant.) Advertisement Yet according to GM, throughout 2014 it never tested the quality of the water--reportedly used for drinking water, coffee and showers—at the taps of its Flint operations. When asked, the company refused to say why. A document sent by a spokesperson noted that it tested “consumable water sources” at its facilities, but not until the fall of 2015, when the situation proved even worse and it emerged that lead was leaching off water pipes and flowing into the Flint water supply. Advertisement And so as residents were dealing with a boil water advisory over high total coliform bacteria levels and brown water spewing from their faucet, city officials quickly acquiesced to the automaker and allowed it to leave the system, emails and documents show. GM got off easy while residents’ complaints fell on deaf ears. It would be another year before Flint switched back to its original source, when the Snyder administration finally admitted there was also a lead problem. Advertisement In a city whose highs and lows are deeply intertwined with GM, the optics were jarring. There’s an untold side to GM’s recent role in Flint—apart from the common tale of lies, cover-ups, and an environmental nightmare that has led to criminal indictments of 13 state and local officials. The auto behemoth didn’t have a direct hand in the governmental decisions that led to Flint’s water becoming tainted with lead, but GM figures into the complicated situation of Flint’s water crisis, whether it wants to admit it or not. Years of dumping from the auto plants contributed to the pollution in the river. And as GM drastically reduced its Flint footprint over time--starting in 1940s with the opening of eight industrial complexes, all in Flint’s suburbs rather than in the city—the city’s tax revenue evaporated in tandem. Advertisement It’s interwoven with longstanding issues of race and the impact of deindustrialization, as documented in a lengthy report issued in February by the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. While GM says it has since donated millions of dollars to support community programs for children affected by exposure to lead and causes like United Way, when pressed for specifics on timing, the automaker comes up light. Advertisement “When GM learned of the health advisories regarding Flint’s drinking water it promptly took steps to test water at its Flint operations and to install water filters where appropriate in its Flint locations,” the company told me in a statement. “GM remains diligent about the safety of the water in its facilities and has worked with community organizations to support Flint residents in the aftermath of the water crisis.” The automaker didn’t respond to requests to clarify or elaborate. At least to Williamson, the automaker shoulders more responsibility here than most people think. She retired from GM in 1991, before settling into a property she purchased along a river in a northern Michigan town. In 2002, she moved back to Flint to live closer to her son, buying a home on the city’s south side for $72,000. Advertisement When the water switch happened, Williamson said she started losing clumps of her hair. She married again in the fall 2014, but had divorced her husband within a year. Williamson said he stayed at a house in northern Michigan once the water issues emerged. “We didn’t even make it a year because he refused to be here,” she said. Her son lives in the nearby city of Grand Blanc, but she said his wife refuses to bring their two children—both girls, ages 6 and 9—to her house. “Do you know how hard it is to accept that my grandbabies can’t come to my home?” she told me, fighting back tears. That home she bought for $72,000? It was recently appraised last October, she said. Current value: $22,000. As a morbid memento of sorts, Williamson keeps a bag of her hair that has fallen out, along with two grossly discolored jugs of water that came from her tap. Advertisement To Williamson, the center of Flint’s water crisis isn’t a few bumbling bureaucrats; it’s the automaker whose presence in the city is ubiquitous. It may not make sense nowadays, but Flint still has signs around town that carry a nickname—Vehicle City—that’s more a monument to bygone times than a testament to today. “All of this has been because of General Motors,” Williamson said. “What they left us with here in Flint is a broken economy, they left us with poisoned land, poisoned water and we had politicians that let them walk away here and destroy Flint.” Vehicle City was a fitting name, once. Situated about 60 miles north of Detroit, Flint was heralded as the birthplace of GM more than 100 years ago. Today, it carries the unseemly label as one of the most violent cities in the U.S. The New York Times once referred to it as Murdertown, USA. Advertisement Advertisement GM’s not what it used to be in Flint, but it’s still there. In the fall of 2015, as the extent of the water crisis emerged, the automaker announced an $877 million investment for a new body shop at its assembly plant, which employs 3,164 people and produces light-duty Chevrolet Silverado Crew and Regular Cab trucks, along with the GMC Sierra Crew. The Engine Operations plant on Bristol Road employs about 800 people who produce engines for the Chevy Cruze and Volt. GM’s Flint Metal Center produces sheet metal stampings, about 740 part numbers in all, for the Chevrolet Malibu, Volt, Equinox, as well as the Cadillac Escalade, GMC Acadia and Buick Verano. There’s a laundry list of Flint GM facilities that closed during and after its mid-20th century expansion brought the end of numerous facilities in the city: In the 1980s, GM’s biggest manufacturing complex in the U.S.—known as Buick City--had more than 27,000 workers on site. But by 1999, with demand shrinking for the Buick LeSabre and Pontiac Bonneville, GM closed most of the site. A powertrain facility shuttered in 2010, following the automaker’s filing for bankruptcy, with a fraction of employees shifting elsewhere. What was once the famous Fisher 1 body plant shut its doors in the 1980s. Advertisement That’s why, in part, Flint’s water woes can be attributed to the city’s infrastructure, constructed decades ago with the intention of supporting a robust industrial base—dominated by GM—and, by 1960, close to 200,000 residents. “The management of the Water Department has constantly planned to build to anticipate the needs of a rapidly growing community,” a 1948 financing document for Flint’s water system reads. Soon after, city officials realized its water source—then, ironically, also the Flint River—didn’t have the capacity to service Flint’s needs. In the 1960s, a plan was hatched to supply the city with water from Lake Huron. By then, GM had already started to pull out, slowly but surely. In 1978, GM employed more than 80,000 Flint-area residents, according to a study by Michigan State University. By 2015, that figure plummeted, to nearly 7,000, thanks to automation, work shifting outside the U.S. or outright closures. The days of American cars being built solely in America, and mostly by human hands, are increasingly numbered. Advertisement Advertisement As industry fled, taking residents with it, Flint’s aging water infrastructure deteriorated as well. By 2015, Flint was only using about 13 million gallons (mg) of water per day, despite having an extra 90 mg of capacity to spare. Excess capacity is known to result in high water age and lead to potential quality issues; with fewer customers, there’s less revenue to properly maintain the infrastructure, according to a report commissioned by the state of Michigan. So when Flint switched water sources in the spring of 2014, it began sending corrosive water into a system that was ripe for creating problems with lead and legionella bacteria. (During the time Flint’s river was used by the city, 12 people died from Legionnaires’ disease and more than 90 fell ill, the cause of which is believed to be the river itself.) Advertisement “The very long water travel time from the treatment plant to many homes in Flint, would be expected to increase problems with both lead and legionella,” Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech professor who assisted in efforts to uncover the water crisis, told me by email. “This over-capacity was undoubtedly a major issue—losing a major customer made a bad situation even worse.” After the carmaker was founded in the early 1900s and started to rapidly grow in the intervening years, GM had become a focal point for concerns over working conditions in the auto industry. In 1936, Flint auto workers launched one of the first automotive sit-down strikes, lasting 44 days and leading to the growth of unions across the U.S. During the same period, the Great Migration began. Millions of black Americans relocated from the south to the northeast and Midwest. The promise of a good-paying GM job led Claire McClinton’s parents from Mississippi to Flint. Advertisement Advertisement “It’s a typical story of the populous of Flint, how we got to this carriage town,” she told me over coffee at a local diner. “How it grew and become a beacon of hope for working-class people.” One of seven children, McClinton is a Flint native who has been involved with activism over city’s water crisis since it began. The 67-year-old is a member of the team that helped test Flint water for lead and expose the problem. “GM was the center of life for Flint,” she said. “It’s a company town, a one-horse town, and many people came up here from the South, including my parents, and many others, but particularly African-Americans. But other white workers came from everywhere to come and work in the factories for a decent job and a decent life.” McClinton started at GM in 1972 at a Cadillac plant in Detroit. She was hired into GM’s metal fabricating plant in Flint in the early 1980s, and remained there until her retirement in 2009. Advertisement But GM’s shift away from Flint was pronounced well before McClinton’s hiring. Following World War II, the automaker pursued a corporate strategy that centered on shifting the means of production to the suburbs and away from urban cores, according to Andrew Highsmith, a University of California-Irvine assistant history professor who has extensively researched Flint. In Flint’s suburbs, Highsmith wrote in a 2013 paper, GM constructed eight factories, all forming “an arc around the city.” Advertisement By the end of the 1950s, one-third of GM’s employees in the Flint-area had already migrated to suburban facilities. Numerous forces drove the outward move, Highsmith said:
Yet without Flint, GM’s strategy in the area would’ve been futile. As Highsmith recounts, the automaker courted support from Flint officials to subsidize GM’s expansion—to the city’s own peril. Advertisement “In order to operate their facilities, plant managers required large quantities of water, sanitary sewers, and other municipal services generally unavailable in Flint’s suburbs,” Highsmith wrote. “Consequently, plant managers and other corporate officials aggressively lobbied Flint’s city commissioners to extend water and sewer lines to each of their new suburban plants.” And it worked. At least seven GM suburban facilities had water and sewer hookups, thanks to Flint, by the end of the 1950s. The moves were not met without skepticism. Following a vote in April 1952 to provide water and sewage pipes to a new Chevy plant outside city limits, Robert Clark, the-then director of the local Congress of Industrial Organizations, slammed the city commissioners for their decision. “In taking this action the city fathers are completing the cycle and it now appears that General Motors plants outside the city are going to enjoy all of the major services rendered by the city, including fire and police protection; water and sewage disposal—everything except the doubtful privilege of paying city taxes,” he said. Advertisement But it seemed GM’s goodwill in Flint trumped the concerns of critics. “We have to live here,” one city commissioner said in a 1960 meeting, “and without GM Flint wouldn’t exist.” The automaker threw its weight behind a proposal to unite Flint and surrounding Genesee County under one regional government. But the fractious wedge of urban sprawl--racist housing policies, highway development, and a congressional vote in the 1950s that allowed for defense contractors like, at the time, GM, to deduct 100 percent of capital expenditures on new facilities—killed the proposal at the poll. Advertisement As the 1970s and 80s approached, GM’s plant closures in Flint ticked upward, compounding the city’s growing financial duress, forcing it to the brink of bankruptcy, according to Highsmith. To keep GM in town, city officials approved numerous tax abatements for the automaker, which “coincided with a net loss of nearly 15,000 local positions at GM,” Highsmith wrote. The thriving company town wasn’t such any longer. Advertisement “If we have the tax bases deteriorating, we don’t have jobs to maintain the quality of life and things like this,” McClinton told me. Flint officials have struggled to repair the Flint River’s reputation. Indeed, Edwards himself has said that the river water could’ve been rendered potable, if treated properly. But the reputation for GM was fitting, if you ask Flint’s residents. “When they said they were going to switch to Flint River, General Motors’ name came up because we knew it had been a toxic dumping ground for a lot of the manufacturing,” McClinton said, adding: “The river itself with all of the dredge and sludge and waste from the factories was in there and we’re like, ‘Really? You going, you know, going go to go to the river?’” Mary Dozier, a 66-year old Flint native and retired GM worker, echoed McClinton, saying she had a simple thought when the Flint River switch was announced: “Hell, no.” Advertisement Advertisement “We always knew that the water was bad in the Flint River because Buick always dumped toxic waste in there,” she said. “Long time, it never was cleaned up. I guess about two years after that, they said they’d cleaned it up. They went through, dug up all the cars and dead bodies, but that was the water you never drank.” A 1963 study from the U.S. Department of Interior said the Flint River “receives most of its pollution from two sources, industrial plants and the Flint sewage-treatment plant.” At the time, the study noted, Flint’s city commission discouraged extending its public water facilities any further for corporations in the city, noting that four Chevy plants stood out as the “largest industrial users among those outside the city.” Despite the efforts to address pollution of the river, as well as the city’s switch by the late 1960s away from the Flint River to Detroit’s water system, problems persisted. As The Verge reported: Advertisement
To be sure, numerous companies and industry lined Flint’s waterways, all partly attributable for the river’s pollution. But despite the insistence of officials that Flint’s water was safe to drink after it started using the river, Dozier said she didn’t buy it. Not when there was brown water coming from her faucet. “Brown water,” she said. “It smelled. we turned it on, and we would get brown water coming out of the faucet.” She’s been on bottled water ever since, six cases a week for cooking, drinking, whatever she needs. Advertisement Advertisement Setting that scene in 2017 against the backdrop of a previous era, when families flocked to Flint, in search of a better life, the long-term impact of the water crisis feels all the more jarring. Today, Vera Perry, a GM retiree Flint native who sits on the city’s board of education, said she feels like she lives “in a third-world country,” a far cry from the era her parents lived through when they came from Arkansas for good-paying jobs. “When you see people lined up in those countries to go pump water, I feel just like them,” she said. In telling its side of the story, GM has maintained that problems from Flint’s water were confined to its engine plant in the city. Last year, Automotive News published a prime example of this narrative, in a story titled “How GM saved itself from the Flint water crisis.” Advertisement “Plant officials were among the first people in Flint to detect something wrong,” the story reads, disregarding the complaints immediately pouring into City Hall upon the water switch. The story goes on:
But emails between GM and the city obtained by Jalopnik portray a more concerning situation. Advertisement On May 7, two weeks after Flint started using the Flint river, Irene Bashore, an environmental engineer at GM’s Flint assembly plant sent an email to Flint water officials, raising concern about “conductivity values spikes on our intake water.” In response, Mike Glasgow, the water quality supervisor at Flint’s water treatment plant, told Bashore that he was dealing with a broken sludge line that was integral to soften the river water. The incident hasn’t been previously reported. Advertisement “To make a long story short, we are treating roughly 20 million gallons of water a day, but only have the ability to soften about 10 million gallons a day,” Glasgow wrote. Problems continued throughout the summer, and in August 2014, a decision was made by GM to get off the system. When the automaker finally made the push to switch off Flint’s water system, city officials were eager to answer GM’s call, just as they had a half-century ago. The same couldn’t be said for complaints from Flint residents. Advertisement One name that sticks out in the emails is Howard Croft, Flint’s former public works director who’s now facing criminal charges for his role in the water crisis. On August 13, he reached out to several GM officials requesting to meet and discuss its water issues. Advertisement “We will take every measure to address the current situation,” Croft wrote. A week later, GM’s Bashore reached out again to the water department with issues plaguing the assembly plant. “GM Flint Assembly is interested in investigating the potential opportunity to be able to tie into the [Detroit water system], as also requested by GM Flint Engine operations,” Bashore wrote on Aug. 19, in a previously unreported email. Advertisement Daughtery Johnson, Flint’s then-utilities administrator who’s also facing criminal charges, responded: “We are committed to satisfying the water needs of the GM operations.” Bashore’s maneuvering worked, and she joined officials from Flint’s engine plant in a meeting with Croft and other Flint officials at a meeting the next day. According to meeting minutes, one discussion topic pertained to the assembly plant, which was, among other things, dealing with high chlorides in its phosphate system, “leading to streaking.” Advertisement A week after the meeting, Croft assured GM that necessary officials needed to sign off on the switch were aware of the situation and “they will be prepared to help you expedite the process.” There was a snag, however. A few weeks later, a GM official reached out to Croft again, seeking a particular document that was necessary to “move this process along.” Advertisement Again, Croft was eager to help. “I will work proactively to locate the requested document and furnish it to you as quickly as possible,” he wrote in a Sept. 26, 2014, email. “I will look to include the right personnel to meet your needs.” By mid-October, the plan was announced to the public that GM would switch its engine plant off the city’s water system, from the Flint River and back to Lake Huron water provided by the city of Detroit. Advertisement Residents, to put it plainly, were floored. Not only would the loss of GM increase the excess capacity of the system, but it’d come at a cost of $400,000 per year to Flint’s coffers. “That was one of the single events that we knew that the powers that be don’t give a damn about us,” McClinton, the GM retiree, told me. When juxtaposed with the response Flint residents received to their complaints about Flint’s water quality, the speed at which GM’s problems were addressed make it feel like a demarcation line in Flint’s story. Advertisement In January 2015, after dealing with three boil water advisories in the prior year, residents received an alarming notice that a high level of a disinfection byproduct called trihalomethanes (TTHM) had been found in the city’s water. Despite a growing number of complaints, officials remained adamant that Flint would stick with the river until a new regional water system was complete. “It’s not possible to just push a button and go back,” the city’s emergency manager at the time, Jerry Ambrose, said in late January of that year, citing the additional cost. Ambrose soon after declined a formal offer from Detroit to reconnect Flint with its system. Advertisement Concerns about high lead levels emerged internally among state regulators by March 2015, but the issue wasn’t fully-known to residents at the time. But concerns over the water system continued to deteriorate. Flint’s City Council voted that month to “do all things necessary” to switch back to Detroit’s water system. Ambrose slammed the move and used his power to overrule the vote. It boiled down to cost. How could cash-strapped Flint afford to spend the extra money for Detroit water? Advertisement Without a solid tax base, Flint was beholden to a state that could appoint a single person, like Ambrose, to run the city and implement an austere budget—whether or not residents wanted it. A 2011 study from Michigan State University included an analysis of what Flint needed to recoup attain the level of property and income tax revenue it had the last time the city ran a budget surplus. The study found that would require new investment equal to “almost eleven times the current assessed value of the city’s single largest taxpayer, General Motors.” Advertisement In that sense, the ability to reach those prior revenue levels was all but insurmountable. “In the heyday, we had a lot of attorneys in the community,” Perry, the Flint education board member and GM retiree, told me. “You had a lot of doctors inside the city. You had all the big mom and pop shops. Everything was in here, and brighter. With the demise of GM, those places have gone.” Throughout the water crisis, officials cited cost as the main deterrent for Flint’s ability to treat the river: It didn’t have money to install the equipment necessary to treat the river water before the switch was made; it couldn’t afford switching back to Detroit’s water system (only until state officials finally conceded it was necessary and kicked in some cash); it couldn’t afford upkeep of its water infrastructure, which made an already dangerous situation even worse. Advertisement Advertisement “What can you happen is the biofilm [of water pipes] can harbor a wide array of what are called opportunistic pathogens,” Erik Olson, director of the National Resources Defense Council health program, told me. “These are bugs that for most healthy people aren’t going to be a problem. But if a person has been compromised that can be a big problem. One of them is legionella.” Since October 2015, the cost of addressing the disaster for the city, the state, and the U.S. has reached extraordinary levels, with estimates exceeding more than $1 billion. That’s what made an announcement this month from Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver, seem almost surreal. Advertisement At a press conference on April 18, Weaver announced that she had officially recommended for Flint to permanently remain on Detroit’s water system. Residents in the audience were overjoyed—a switch to a new system was planned in the coming months, but neither they, nor officials, wanted to experience the impact of what that could do to their water quality. “Ensuring the public’s health and safety is our number one top priority,” Weaver said. But the dark, cruel reality was this: Weaver’s decision put Flint in the same position, on the same system it used, before the water crisis began. All that after potentially upward of $1.5 billion now needed to fix the city’s water system, of which the state and federal government has already appropriated more than $350 million to address the crisis; the potential lifelong impacts of lead poisoning in Flint’s children; and the utter obliteration of trust in government shared by Flint residents, perhaps never to be fixed again. Advertisement Advertisement The revelation gave Flint’s water crisis a feel of predetermination. What was the point of it all? What possessed officials to allow this to drag on for so long? Sitting in the room, the situation felt so far lost that you couldn’t possibly drum up an answer to the basic question of just why officials stood idly by for 18 months as a city was fed poisoned water—why there wasn’t a serious intervention from regulators, the governor, or his emergency manager until the situation had reached a fever pitch, thanks entirely to the residents and researchers who forced officials to respond. At the very least, why was it not addressed it sooner? Advertisement A task force appointed by Snyder to review what went wrong had a firm idea of when that should’ve happened: When GM announced it was leaving the Flint system, in October 2014. Following that decision, emails show, two members of Snyder’s executive staff said GM’s move was more than enough reason to consider switching Flint back to its previous water source. “The suggestion made by members of the Governor’s executive staff in October 2014 to switch back to [Detroit’s system] should have resulted, at a minimum, in a full and comprehensive view of the water situation in Flint,” the task force wrote in March 2016. Advertisement Advertisement Back at Weaver’s press conference, a police officer escorted a Flint resident out of the room for interrupting the proceedings too many times. The man offered one last remark, as if he was getting at the root cause of it all—just why, three years after Flint was sent barreling down this hellish path, it found itself right back where it all began. “Middle class right here got destroyed,” he shouted. “Talk about the middle class.” Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com April 28, 2017 at 06:15AM
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Deep Sentinel raises $7.4M to bring deep learning to home security http://ift.tt/2oTCZQr Deep Sentinel, a home security startup, today announced that it had closed a $7.4 million Series A led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Lux Capital and UP2398. Founded by serial entrepreneur David Selinger, Deep Sentinel is betting that its emphasis on user experience can provide needed differentiation in the crowded space. Over tea in the historic Palace Hotel in San Francisco, Selinger laid out the philosophy behind his latest company. Selinger believes that the nature of property crimes has changed. Without ever entering a home, burglars can cost homeowners thousands by simply nabbing an Amazon delivery resting on a front porch. This shift in behavior necessitates a shift in the services provided by home security companies. But legacy players like ADT, founded in 1874, haven’t kept up with the times. Selinger is confident he can both expand the market and steal market share by moving the security line to the parameter of a property rather than the permitter of a home. To do this, the company is producing a series of cameras powered by deep learning that can evaluate threats on a property. This is the same technology that automakers are using for self-driving cars and companies like Facebook use to identify people and objects within your photos. Deep Sentinel wasn’t able to show us its hardware because it’s still in development, but I’d imagine it looks exactly like any other home security camera. Cameras themselves are largely commoditized, so the value that the company delivers will come from its software. The system is designed to consume video streams and other contextual information to analyze threats facing a home. Selinger was clear in articulating that Deep Sentinel is not simply a monitoring solution, it’s designed to respond and ultimately deter criminals. This could include appropriately applied warnings or lights. The company actually considered using drones for deterrence, though Selinger now believes the technology is still too nascent. Selinger is entering a crowded market — Camio’s smart video monitor, Hikvision’s Intel Movidius-powered cameras, Netatmo’s Presence and many others deliver some degree of intelligence to the camera, but the key to Deep Sentinel is its comprehensiveness and user experience. Any developer with a Saturday to kill can build a rudimentary object classifier with a neural network and any startup with a few million can buy its way to a fairly solid machine intelligence product. But technology doesn’t sell, products do. Using deep learning as a sales tactic is a waste of everyone’s time. You wouldn’t put a Qualcomm Snapdragon on a Nokia 3310 and expect it to compete with an iPhone. This is why Selinger is focused on using his technology to address core customer concerns like privacy and cost. By optimizing to reduce the computational load of Deep Sentinel’s deep learning models, Selinger and his team have been able to do most of their processing locally. While customers will be able to customize their cameras, Deep Sentinel’s hardware will be pre-trained before delivery. Moreover, the cameras have been designed to work together so analysis only has to be done in the portions of a video feed where a threat is occurring or likely to occur. This not only reduces the cost for the consumer, because they don’t have to be responsible for a hefty cloud computing bill, but it also means users don’t have to share as much private information in the cloud. Jason Pressman, a Partner at Shasta Ventures, told me that he was surprised at both the size of the home security market and the inadequacy of existing solutions. Shasta is no stranger to consumer connected hardware companies. It was one of the early investors in Nest, a success the firm surely hopes Deep Sentinel can replicate next year when it’s product comes to market. Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com April 28, 2017 at 06:10AM |
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