Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is bringing in its first female general partner, former federal prosecutor Katie Haun, to help manage a new $300 million fund dedicated to investing in cryptocurrency and blockchain-related projects.
Andreessen Horowitz has long invested in cryptocurrency companies, including the digital-wallet company Coinbase and the game company Cryptokitties. But in addition to signaling its seriousness about the technology, general partner Chris Dixon says that creating a fund will give the firm more flexibility to make different types of investments. The new fund will invest not just in traditional equities, but in digital tokens as well. In other words, it will invest not just in companies but in the cryptocurrencies those companies create. An Andreessen Horowitz spokesperson said investors in the fund are among the firm’s usual investors.
Haun got her start in cryptocurrency by investigating two of its best-known scandals: two federal agents convicted on corruption charges during their own investigation of the black market site Silk Road, and the implosion of the bitcoin exchange service Mt. Gox. In 2015, she established the government’s first cryptocurrency task force to help the government get up-to-speed on the technology.
“In that process I ended up working alongside and getting to know the entrepreneurs in that space,” she says. “I started realizing how transformative all this technology was.”
She also started teaching Stanford Law School’s first cryptocurrency course in 2015, and as the technology grew and new projects emerged, she wanted to get more involved. So she left her job in government and joined the board of Coinbase in 2017, where she got to know the partners at Andreessen Horowitz.
Despite her background as a prosecutor, Haun says she’s not at Andreessen Horowitz to root out fraudulent cryptocurrency projects but rather to work on good projects. Still, her legal expertise could be a major asset to both the firm and to the companies it funds.
VC firms are still seeking their role in cryptocurrency amidst legal uncertainties and the rise of the new style of funding called “initial coin offerings,” or ICOs. During an ICO, the makers of a new cryptocurrency pre-sell certain amounts of their digital tokens to investors, helping fund the creation of their technology without necessarily selling ownership stakes in the company to venture capitalists. The creation of a dedicated fund by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the best-known firms in Silicon Valley, will add legitimacy to the nascent industry.
ICOs have raised more than $11.4 billion so far this year according to the website CoinSchedule. Some cryptocurrency companies have pursued hybrid models. For example, the decentralized storage and publishing company Protocol Labs pre-sold $52 million in cryptocurrency tokens to advisers including VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Union Square, before offering an ICO to accredited investors that raised an additional $205 million.
Dixon says the firm is able to offer entrepreneurs things that an ICO can’t. “We have 80 people in our operating team whose job it is to support the companies we invest in and we have people here with deep expertise in regulatory issues, recruiting, marketing, general management, et cetera,” he says. “We think the onus is on us to prove that we are indeed great partners to entrepreneurs and as long as we do that entrepreneurs will want to work with us.”
If you had any remaining doubts about the performance and power of electric cars, then you should spend eight minutes (ok, just under eight minutes) watching the Volkswagen ID R smash the Pikes Peak Hill Climb Record yesterday. The all-electric race car not only set a new record for EVs, but set the fastest time ever, by any car, even ones with high-performance, gas-gulping, engines.
Pikes Peak is the second oldest race in the US, after the Indianapolis 500, and it is one of the world’s most iconic: 12.42 miles of 156 twists and turns rising nearly 5,000 feet in elevation.
The previous record, eight minutes and 13 seconds, was set in 2013 by Sebastian Loeb in a Peugeot 208. That car had a 3.2 liter, twin turbo, V6. The fastest electric car finished the race in eight minutes, 57 seconds.
The VW ID R made both times look like leisurely Sunday drives, setting a new time of seven minutes, 57.148 seconds. It’s a major affirmation of Volkswagen’s choice to run an electric car, powered by two motors and two battery packs wrapped around the driver’s cockpit.
The steep climb has traditionally taxed internal combustion engines, because the air gets thinner the higher they go; by the time they get to the top, the engines produce 30 percent less power than they did at the bottom. Electric cars don’t need to inhale any oxygen at all. That gives them a potential inherent advantage, but until now they haven’t been able to beat the best conventional cars.
“For Pikes Peak, to break records, you have to go to electric cars, I think that’s been proven now,” says Sven Smeets, Volkswagen’s motorsport director.
That’s not to say the team had it easy. It developed the car from scratch in just eight months, and built a low, sleek, machine that weighs less than 2,500 pounds, even including its heavy batteries. Power output is 670 hp, which VW says will get the car to 60 mph in 2.2 seconds (so, faster than a Formula 1 car). Everyone knows that electric drivetrains can perform insane acts of acceleration, thanks to Tesla and its ludicrous mode. The problem is that once the battery starts to heat up, which can happen after just a couple of full-power sprints, performance falls off. Fast.
Louis Yio/Volkswagen
To save weight, the team chose not to use water to cool the battery packs, but relied on air cooling instead. That worked in simulations, but they’d never had a chance to run the full course in real life (qualifying runs are performed on a shorter section of the road), so everyone was nervous before Sunday’s sprint. “Our battery management worked,” says a relieved Smeets. The driver, Romain Dumas, had full power all the way to the top.
Your next electric car won’t be able to perform the same feats, though. The ID R has batteries that are “way ahead” of anything currently on the streets, according to Smeets. The team tweaked the chemistry of the cells so they would have maximum power and temperature tolerance, and, crucially, they didn’t have to consider range, like a traditional electric car designers do. At the end of the relatively short race, the packs were already out of charge. Nobody’s going to buy an EV with 12 miles of range, no matter how fast it is.
The team believes the ID R could actually set an even faster time on the climb. Weather for the Pikes Peak race can vary wildly from cool to way-too-hot, and from clear to wet and rainy. On Sunday, conditions were just about perfect, but one section of track was a little damp from early morning fog. The driver (and his tires) had to scramble through it: “He was understeering a lot, which he didn’t face when he did it in the dry, during tests,” says Smeets.
The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb runs just over 12 miles up the side of the mountain. It has 156 corners, some of them without guard rails.
Volkswagen
Understeering forced Dumas to take a few corners slightly more slowly than ideal, so the team thinks that in perfect conditions, the car could perform even better.
VW is already looking at other opportunities for the ID R race car to prove the power of electric propulsion, but the vehicle was designed specifically for this challenge. (Its full name is the ID R Pikes Peak.) It has huge spoilers front and back to produce the downforce needed in thin air, which might be overkill on a track at sea level.
Motor racing is traditionally a showcase and testing ground for advanced automotive technology that will eventually make its way into regular cars. For electric vehicles though, development in road cars is happening so quickly, that road- and race-vehicle engineers are learning from each other. VW, for example, is working to bring three new members of the ID range to market (any electric vehicle it’s making gets called an ID, for some reason), including a Golf-sized hatchback for Europe, the ID Crozz crossover SUV, and the ID Buzz microbus. Whether they adapt battery-management techniques from race winners or whether ultra-rapid race machines get range extensions from production car investments, everyone comes out a winner.
Yo’oko, who was named by students at Hiaki High School in Tucson, Arizona, last year, was photographed by trail cameras several times in the last couple of years. Wildlife experts compared the photographs of Yo’oko with the photograph of the pelt, which was taken in Mexico; the fur pattern appeared identical.
“This tragedy is piercing,” Randy Serraglio, a conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said in a press release provided to The Dodo. “It highlights the urgency to protect jaguar habitat on both sides of the border and ensure that these rare, beautiful cats have safe places to live … The thought of having to explain to those kids at Hiaki High School that somebody killed their favorite jaguar really just breaks my heart.”
The video, shot by marine biologist Sharee Marris, shows a sea dragon, a kind of animal related to the sea horse, near Portsea Pier, a habitat off Australia famous for weedy sea dragon sightings. The animal is drifting along over a tangle of underwater grasses, caught in something that at first looks like a kind of garment that has become caught around his little body.
A closer look reveals the little dress to be a plastic bag.
You gotta hand it to HBO: Their shows know how to deliver explosive endings. No matter how uneven the season of television that came before it, the finales are always blue-fire-breathing game-changers. They may not always be narratively-warranted or cogent, but they are explosive.
Which brings us to the end of Westworld Season 2. After what felt like nine hours of exposition following the host revolt at the end of Season 1 and throughout the current one, the revolution’s leader, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), and its accidental architect, Bernard/Digital Ghost of Ford (Jeffrey Wright), sent some of the hosts off to Host Valhalla and got themselves out of Westworld. Oh, and the Man in Black (Ed Harris) got a big ol’ dose of reality. (Does none of this make sense? Read our recap here.)
It was a whiplash-inducing, extra-long episode that completely rebooted the series for a whole new narrative in Season 3. (Dolores is off-world, y’all!) To try to wrap our heads around what just happened WIRED convened a council of Westworld guests—editors and writers Angela Watercutter, Jason Kehe, Jason Parham, Ellen Airhart, and Westworld recapper Sandra Upson—to dissect the final tick-tock of the show’s second season.
Angela Watercutter, Senior Associate Editor: As I’m sure you’ve all noticed over the last few weeks, I’m something of a Westworld skeptic. I haven’t exactly loved this season and I’m not 100 confident all of this setup is actually going anywhere. I enjoy the concepts and performances, I just struggle with investing in it. It’s a smart show, but the creators seem to think that making a cerebral drama just involves spending a lot of time literally in the heads of its cast. Seriously, how many scenes this season featured a tight shot on Jeffrey Wright as we watched him furtively try to clean up his own code or remember some long lost nugget of info?
The finale was no different—half of it was spent in The Forge with Dolores and Bernard in brain scanners, immersed in a simulation run by Logan Delos (Ben Barnes), who informs them that humans are predictable and can be reduced to a few thousand lines of code. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ What came after, though, was some actual action. Bernard killed Dolores! Bernard realized he’d made a huge mistake and brought her back again in the form of Delos shill Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson)! She got off of Westworld and went to Arnold’s house! Literally everyone is a deus ex machina! OK, jokes aside, I appreciated this ending. I don’t know that it fully paid off the season, but I have to admit I was cheering Dolores-Hale as her plan came together. Also, I kind of loved that when she got to Arnold’s house she made a new version of her previous self and kept the Hale one. If the future is one ruled by Evan Rachel Wood, Tessa Thompson, and (maybe) Jeffrey Wright, then I, for one, welcome our new host overlords. What about you guys?
Jason Parham, Senior Writer: I made it to episode five.
Watercutter: Jason, I don’t blame you. That’s also where I started to lose my enthusiasm.
Jason Kehe, Senior Associate Editor: People, PEOPLE. If Season 1 was wading into the ocean water, Season 2 was that unexpected drop-off. You know, that spot where the comforting sandbank suddenly gives way to nothingness and you have no idea if there’s a floor anymore at all. But then you find a little patch of rocks. Cuts your feet a little, but at least it’s solid. Or a pleasing warm spot. Did I pee, or is this a gift from the water gods? This really energizes me, I must say. There aren’t too many shows on TV where you’re absolutely, comprehensively confused most of the time—knowing all the while that the creators themselves are right there with you, treading water in the open sea!
Sandra Upson, Senior Editor: I might have been the only person on the internet who didn’t mind all the simulation worlds. Bring on the worlds within worlds!
My main complaint with Season 2 was that too many characters seemed frozen in place. Dolores with her Machiavellian streak was the worst offender. (The shot of her curled up next to Teddy’s dead body was the most relatable she’d been all season.) [Eds. Note: LOL.] But Hale, too, never developed—I don’t think we learned a new thing about her until she got robo-fied. Also, can we just take a moment to be thankful that Bernard finally has a new head? We’re done with the disoriented muttering and head-holding, which felt cartoon-y all season long.
Next season, with our key characters out in the outside world, I bet we’ll have more room for Dolores to be vulnerable and, I don’t know, maybe fall in love with a human. As for Hale, I wonder if the series will do anything interesting around the ideas of embodied cognition—what happens when you have two copies of the same consciousness in different bodies (if that’s in fact what happened)? Surely they’ll evolve in different directions; maybe they’ll even end up competing. It’ll be fascinating to see how that plays out.
On a separate note, what did you guys think about the Ashley Stubbs bit at the end? Was it just that he knew Hale so well that he could tell she wasn’t herself? Or was he saying that he, too, was a host? For one beautiful second I thought he’d been turned into a Stubbsbot and inherited Teddy’s brain orb, which would have been glorious. But no.
Ellen Airhart, Reporting Fellow: I agree with Sandra that the character development felt unsatisfying. In the recap for episode five, the one that seems to have lost everybody, Sandra wrote that Maeve’s relationship with her daughter was not convincing. And it didn’t feel more authentic after that episode, though there was the whole scene in the house with the Ghost Nation. I like Maeve as a character, but this problem with her “core drive” threw me off and made her death seem less-than-poignant.
I’m also annoyed that I’m still confused about where everyone was during crucial events. As Sandra said during a real-life conversation today, there are just so many elevators. How did Bernard not run into the Man in Black on the way down to The Forge? Where is the Man in Black during any given moment in the episode, besides the part in the beginning when he’s with Dolores? The writers are no doubt setting him up for a side plot to the story of Dolores tearing up the real world a la Amy Adams in Enchanted for Season 3, but the questions about time and place feel frustrating, not exciting. After all, it was supposed to be a finale.
Upson: I share those questions, Ellen. Still, I’m excited about seeing what happens with the Man in Black. I found him frustrating for most of this season, because I never understood what motivated him or where he was going. Not to get too literal, but when he was out in the wilderness, how did he know whether to turn right or left at the next tree? That subplot only snapped into focus for me in the finale—that his real goal in finding “The Door” was to delete all the data Delos had collected on him. Now I’m super curious about what happened when he finally dragged his sorry self in there, and what it was we saw in the epilogue with his daughter, Emily (Katja Herbers). It seems like that encounter occurs in some future timeline that will get developed in Season 3, but in the meantime, how am I supposed to think about his missing hand? Why does he look exactly as dusty and beat up as he did when we saw him blow his arm off?
Watercutter: Sandra, these are all good questions. If the Man in Black is a host version of William, which seems to be the case since Emily is testing his fidelity, is it possible that he just went into some kind of sleep mode after he lost his hand trying to shoot Dolores? Does that explain the strange passing of time between the moment he got to The Forge and when he actually made his way in? Also, since Logan in the simulation mentioned—while walking through a room that contained a host William/Man in Black—that he’d been testing thousands of outcomes and people really never changed, perhaps the epilogue was just a simulation? Actually, I don’t really think that. I think that on some level the Man in Black/William had known from early on that Ford had given the hosts a way out and had been going back into Westworld again and again until he could get to The Forge and, essentially, delete himself out of the system. Whatever game it was that he was playing with Ford was what he needed to do to accomplish that.
Sandra, I’m also curious to see what happens with Dolores and Dolores-Hale. To riff off what Jason Kehe was saying earlier in a Slack conversation, my dream scenario involves the two of them falling in love. Because, let’s be real, there is no one Dolores loves more than herself. Dolores + Dolores-Hale = 4eva. I wish them a lifetime of happiness, character development, and world domination in Season 3.
Kehe: Right? They’re totes gonna have a twin robot sex scene kissy thing. Staple of modern sci-fi, practically. And one has to die, of course, probably saving the other to make up for a massive betrayal. Also, I have to point out the Matrix-y vibes in the finale. Very Architect/Oracle sort of dynamic.
Watercutter: Jason, you are so correct about that. As for Stubbs, what was the thing he said about Ford giving him orders to look out for the hosts? I think he might’ve had an inkling of what was coming and when he noticed that Hale was acting slightly off, he connected the dots.
I dunno, am I crazy and overthinking this? Am I stuck in my own loop?
SAN FRANCISCO — The city of Orlando’s police department has ended its test of a facial recognition program created by Amazon that has come under fire from privacy advocates. But other law enforcement organizations say they continue to use it to solve crimes.
Amazon’s Rekognition software works by comparing images provided by the customer to a database of images the customer has also provided. It searches for a match using the computing power of Amazon’s cloud computing network AWS.
It has come under heavy fire from privacy advocates, who fear it could be used to unfairly target protesters, immigrants and any person just going about their daily business. In May the ACLU and civil rights groups demanded that Amazon stop selling the software tool.
A joint statement issued Monday from the city of Orlando and the Orlando Police Department made clear the city isn’t backing down on using tech when it feels it is warranted.
“Partnering with innovative companies to test new technology — while also ensuring we uphold privacy laws and in no way violate the rights of others — is critical to us as we work to further keep our community safe,” the statement read.
On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida sent a letter to the city calling use of the software a potential invasion of residents’ privacy, free speech and due process rights. The letter demanded that the city stop using Rekognition.
Orlando’s pilot test had ended last week.
The city had created a database composed of pictures of the faces of a handful of Orlando police officers who volunteered to participate in the test, then compared those faces to images from eight city-owned surveillance cameras to see if it could correctly identify the officers when they were in the images from the cameras.
Orland did not use the technology in an investigative capacity or utilize any images of members of the public for testing, Sgt. Eduardo Bernal told USA TODAY.
The ACLU of Florida’s said the restricted scope of the test didn’t mean it would stay restricted forever.
“No City policies or rules meaningfully restrict the Police Department from rapidly expanding the system in the nearfuture by, for example, activating it across the City’s public-facing cameras or adding it to the many body cameras Orlando police officers use every day,” the letter said.
Other law enforcement agencies continue to use the program, though in much more limited ways than privacy advocates have raised concerns over.
In Washington County, Oregon, the Sheriff’s Department has used Rekognition for a year and a half, said Deputy Jeff Talbot. The department confirms each match made through the Rekognition software by another method and it is only used in criminal investigations, he said.
It’s used the software to assist in identifying criminal suspects against the department’s own jail booking photos, which are public record, he said.
“The Sheriff’s Office has not, and will not, utilize this technology for mass or real-time surveillance. That use is prohibited by both Oregon state law and our own policy,” said Talbot.
The software has been used for non-crime purposes as well. For example, during the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Sky News created a database of royals, celebrities and then compared it with photos of the people entering St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle to attend the ceremony.
Using Rekognition, Sky News was able to quickly identify who was in the images, allowing it to run their names as subtitles on the screen as they walked into the church.
The court case that could decide Uber’s future in one of its most important global markets, London, started today. Transport for London, the regulator in that city, had refused to renew the ride-sharing company’s license to operate in September 2017, citing safety concerns around driver background checks and crime reporting. But rather than coming out guns blazing, Uber was conciliatory in court, admitting that it made mistakes and conceding that Transport for London was right to halt its operations.
Uber has had a rough run recently. The ride-hailing services it helped create have certainly changed the way many people get around cities. But the “move fast and break things” approach only works for so long.
Over the past 18 months the company also faced accusations of sexual harassment, a #DeleteUber campaign after it appeared to be trying to profit from a protest against Trump’s travel ban, and a generally toxic corporate culture. Uber also has faced backlash from cities around the world, where regulators and entrenched transport businesses weren’t happy with the way it seemingly ignored things like labor laws, taxi regulations, and safety standards.
But today’s court appearance is a glimpse of the new Uber, a more mature company now led by CEO Dara Khosrowshahi after the ousting of Travis Kalanick. Khosrowshahi is taking a much more measured approach to steering the company that now operates in 600 cities in 65 countries, completing 15 million trips every day.
That number of cities could drop if other major markets follow London’s lead. A judge at Westminster Magistrates Court, London, will decide whether Uber is “fit and proper” to hold a license in the capital now, rather than whether the decision last year was correct, so this is Uber’s chance to show it’s really reformed. Uber has to demonstrate it not only has addressed the immediate concerns, but also that it’ll be a better partner going forward. Uber says it will be happy with a new 18-month license, shorter than the customary five years, to give it time to demonstrate that. (The firm has been allowed to continue operating while it appeals the refusal.)
Transport for London’s chief complaints were safety and security of riders, including how drivers were vetted. It said Uber wasn’t carrying out background checks properly, and that crimes against passengers were going unreported. The concerns covered 21 pages. In reply, Uber says it has introduced 24/7 phone support and proactive reporting of serious incidents to the police.
Uber has allies in its fight—Londoners. Few residents own cars, and they quickly started to rely on Uber when it was launched in 2012. About 600,000 of them signed a petition to save it after Transport for London’s decision, and they’re watching this case expectantly.
This rather conciliatory approach is a sign Uber is maturing from a brash Silicon Valley startup into a global corporation. The newfound respect for laws and regulations will serve it well in the other part of the company’s business, seen as critical to its future: autonomous vehicles. Uber rushed self-driving cars onto the roads to keep up with the likes of Waymo, but suspended all testing after a fatal crash in Arizona in March, in which one of its cars hit and killed a pedestrian walking a bike. The safety driver on board was likely streaming TV to her phone, according to local police investigating the accident.
Uber has since been accused of cutting corners, jamming its software in real cars without enough hours in simulators, and slashing costs by having just one backup person aboard instead of two, even though humans make terrible safety supervisors and can easily become distracted.
To get self-driving cars on the roads of states like California, where the DMV has strict rules about reporting performance and crashes, Uber will need to move a little more slowly and break fewer things. The London hearing is expected to last a few days, and is an opportunity for Uber to show it can do just that.
On Father’s Day, Alex Gil was IMing with his colleague Manan Ahmed when they decided they had to do something about children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border.
Since May, the US government had taken more than 2,300 kids away from their families as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ new “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for criminally prosecuting all people entering the country illegally. Reports started surfacing of the ensuing chaos at the border; in one especially horrible case, a child was reportedly ripped from her mother’s breast. As outrage grew, the question came up over and over again: Where were the children? Between the ad-hoc implementation of “zero tolerance” and the opaque bureaucracy of the immigration system in general, migrant advocates, journalists, and even politicians struggled to find clear answers.
Gil, a father of two, knew they could be useful. As the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University, Gil’s job is to use technology to help people find information—skills he had put to use in times of crisis before.
Torn Apart tries to map the carceral landscape for immigrants detained for being undocumented. Orange dots indicate all ICE facilities; blue dots are private juvenile detention centers.
Gil and Ahmed, a historian at Columbia, assembled a team of what Gil calls “digital ninjas” for a “crisis researchathon.” These volunteers were professors, graduate students, researchers, and fellows from across the country with varied academic focus, but they all had two things in common: an interest in the history of colonialism, empire, and borders; and the belief that classical research methods can be used not just to understand the past but to reveal the present.
They set up a Telegram chat and a master Google spreadsheet, and then they began looking for any publicly available data—government immigration records, tax forms, job listings, Facebook pages—they could use to isolate and locate the detention centers that could be holding these children.
The result of their week of frantic research is Torn Apart / Separados, an interactive web site that visualizes the vast apparatus of immigration enforcement in the US, and broadly maps the shelters where children can be housed. The name is meant to evoke not only the families who have been separated, but the way in which this sundering rips the social fabric of our country.
“It shows that ICE is everywhere,” Gil says. “We ourselves were shocked even though we study this. A lot of America thinks this phenomenon is happening in this limited geographical space along the border. This map is telling a different story: The border is everywhere.”
Digital Humanities and Crisis Response
The group behind Torn Apart is a part of a growing vanguard known as the digital humanities, an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers who combine 21st-century technical skills and classical research practices to do a new kind of cultural interpretation—and sometimes activism. DH projects include historical and cultural research, archival preservation, crowdsourced mapping, social justice activism, or some combination of those things.
“Our team is the perfect example of what Digital Humanities can be: a body of work that really cuts across units at universities, libraries, departments, and roles like faculty administration and staff to think about the ways digital tools can help us better understand culture,” says Roopika Risam, a professor of English and library fellow at Salem State University and author of New Digital Worlds, about promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record.
Risam, Gil, Ahmed, and Torn Apart teammate Moacir de Sa Pereira, who teaches in NYU’s English department, are all members of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, or XPMethod, which is “dedicated to the rapid prototyping of speculative ideas.” They were joined last week by Sylvia Fernandez and Maira Alvarez, graduate students at the University of Houston who specialize in literature of the borderlands and who co-founded Borderlands Archives Cartography, and Linda Rodriguez and Merisa Martinez.
This is not the first time XPMethod has responded to a humanitarian crisis with a map. Last year after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, aid groups struggled to transport food and supplies across the island, a problem made worse by the inadequate and out-of-date maps that were available. The XPMethod team and 60 other volunteers from 25 institutions held an emergency mapathon to crowdsource maps and get them to people in the field. After that experience, Gil put together a toolkit so that other people could set up what Gil refers to as “nimble tent”—a popup team of digital researchers collaborating on a specific project in response to crisis.
Their “nimble tent” work is driven by a need to be part of the solution. It’s the same urge that’s driven so many people in recent weeks to post on social media and raise money for advocacy groups helping immigrant families. The internet, with its vast and ephemeral nooks and archives, is a tantalizing resource in moments of social unease. For anyone with enough digital savvy and the ability to work quickly, the nimble tent model offers a way to do something, anything in response to crisis, even from halfway around the world.
Building Torn Apart
After a day of phone calls on Sunday, Gil and Ahmed had their team, but their mandate wasn’t immediately clear. The most urgent problem, as they saw it, was that parents couldn’t locate their children. While President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to end the family separations, instead allowing indefinite detention of families together, little has been done to resolve the issue.
Under the zero tolerance policy’s initial implementation, when the government detained a family for crossing the border illegally, at first everyone was in the hands of Customs and Border Patrol, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security. But once parents were charged, they were sent into an ICE detention facility and their children were handed over to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Refugee Resettlement. As WIRED and others have reported, these agencies are not set up to keep track of families as a unit, so parents trying to find their children have had very little luck. Many children and parents haven’t been able to reach other by phone since being separated.
The Torn Apart team knew there was information out there about the locations of detention centers, and which centers could hold children. That information just wasn’t aggregated in one place—a problem they set out to remedy.
First, the team looked through a trove of official ICE records released to journalists through a Freedom of Information Act request. It gave them the broad picture of where US detention centers are located, but they still needed to understand where children were being held. Risam began tracking down nonprofit facilities that contract with HHS and ORR to care for children. The ICE data referenced 113 youth shelters and their general geographical locations, but the names themselves were redacted. Then Risam found data compiled by Syracuse University in 2015 that listed the names of shelters where immigrant children had been transferred, and from there she was able to identify the nonprofits associated with them.
With the nonprofit names in hand, Risam went looking for their corporate 990 tax documents, which gave her locations that she could cross-reference with the ICE data to map where immigrant children are held. What she found “feels very much like a patchwork of shelters,” she says. Sa Pereira visualized Risam’s work by demarcating 113 ORR shelters, including nonprofit, religious, and government-run facilities, as black dots on the map. Try to click on one, though, and it will move, suggesting how the government resists pinpointing these sites.
Housing migrant children has been big business since a flood of unaccompanied minors began entering the US in 2014. Nearly 11,000 children are held in these facilities, according to HHS. Risam wasn’t able to see which ones definitely held the children newly separated from their parents under Trump’s policy, but mapping where children generally are allowed to be held at least gave some insight into where they could be.
They slept little. Gil ordered pizza for his kids instead of making dinner most nights. With the blessings of their institutions, they cleared as much time as they could to focus on the project. “It has taken a lot of emotional and mental energy,” says Alvarez, who along with Fernandez mapped the legal entry points along the border for a section of Torn Apart called “The Trap.” For both women, the week was intensely personal. They grew up in the borderlands and used their experience to seek the right data—to look for pedestrian crossings versus commercial entry points, for instance.
To the team’s surprise, immigration detention facilities were not isolated at the southern border. Rather, it was a vast web that crisscrossed every state in the nation. Even the centers that hold children are farther from the border than they expected, in places like the Northeast. This, the team realized, was the story they had to tell: how immigration enforcement reaches into every part of America.
Much of the team’s conversation during the week focused on how to display the information so families, journalists, and advocates could actually use it. They also needed to “strike a balance,” as Risam puts it, between raising awareness, protecting the privacy of the children, and discouraging harassment. Gil is aware some people might want to track down phone numbers and addresses of detention centers and harass the staff. “That can turn into a mess real quick and do more harm than good,” he says. Ultimately, they decided to show the city and state a detention center is in, but not the actual address or name of the facility, in the hopes of dissuading bad behavior.
“The Eye” shows satellite images of ICE detention centers across America. Click on one and zoom in to the specific location. The design is meant to convey that ICE is everywhere.
The website, which Sa Pereira coded, is full of design choices meant to not just impart information but also to evoke a more visceral reaction. In one particularly moving visualization called the Eye, Sa Pereira positioned satellite photos of ICE detention centers over the continental US. The thumbnail grid itself is jarring, but click on one, and you zoom across America to the town or city in which the center sits. It’s dizzying. These centers are often right in the middle of everyday urban and suburban life—in a nondescript New York city, for instance, or in a strip mall next to a nail salon.
“You get that voyeuristic creepiness of looking at satellite imagery, but also a creepiness of recognition that this could be anywhere. This isn’t in the desert surrounded by barbed wire, this is down the street,” Sa Pereira says. “Children being put into cages is terrible, and it’s indicative and symptomatic of a much larger problem. This is a way to make that system visible.”
Torn Apart achieves this with maps, as well as testimonies, visualizations, and what Gil calls “textures,” personal and surreal ephemera like parents asking where their children are in a Google business review or promotional material from SouthwestKey, a nonprofit immigration shelter corporation, boasting that “95 percent” of the population it serves are people of color.
DigitalGlobe/Texas Orthoimagery
A Living Resource
It is more than information. It is a living resource, one the team hopes migrants will use to find their families and that researchers will build upon. Much of the project’s power is in its archival potential. “No one is documenting what is happening in everyday life of migrants,” according to Fernandez. “This is a digital historical record.”
As the team was finalizing Torn Apart Friday, the Washington Post published its own crowdsourced map of detention centers housing migrant children, which included some but not all the inputs gathered for Torn Apart. Gil is trying to get in touch with the paper to offer the rest of their data, and to cross-reference Torn Apart against the Post’s data. The researchers’ work dovetails with investigative journalism: The goal of both is to use information to make sense of confusion.
The site went live at 12:30 pm Eastern time on Monday. The team can hopefully get some sleep, but the project is not over. Outside researchers will now peer-review it. Half of the Torn Apart crew are now in Mexico for the annual Digital Humanities Conference, where they will hold another researchathon.
“It’s like a hot potato,” Gil says. “Now we want to pass on the same data source to other teams to refine and tell their own story.”
Updated to clarify that Gil and Ahmed came up with the idea for Torn Apart in an IM conversation.
Correction at 7pm: Moacir de Sa Pereira’s full last name has been corrected on second reference throughout the article.
As the internet changes how we eat, shop and do things, technology companies have become a larger presence and influence at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. If you need proof, all you had to do this week was look at Cannes, France coastline.
The top awards event for the advertising and marketing industries, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is held each year to celebrate the best work from the industry. And whether it’s accurate or not, who has sponsored what has become a barometer of a company’s success.
“Wow!” a fellow festival attendee said. “The WSJ [Wall Street Journal] boat is moving.”
She was remarking on the fact that while most of the yachts were docked, therefore requiring less crew, the News Corp. ship was sailing on the Mediterranean Sea.
“They must have a lot of money,” she added.
In past festivals, advertising holding companies sponsored the beaches. Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Spotify hold the most prominent areas, with Comcast’s ad tech platform Freewheel and CNN also holding down their own sand spots.
Facebook and Pinterest even had their own piers. An advertising executive, who had also seen the Wall Street Journal ship proudly sailing, pointed out Google had many more “moving” boats.
Advertising agencies do have large sponsored meeting areas — especially in the hotels, while the lavish private multi-course dinners for clients at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc and helicopter rides to St. Tropez still exist.
Media companies and consulting firms brought in entertainers like Jon Bon Jovi and Kylie Minogue. However signs that agencies and media companies are cutting back from the excesses of past Cannes were clear to veteran attendees: Some noted the event seemed less crowded this year, with more smaller events instead of few large lavish ones.
The rise in invite-only yacht parties also indicated there more newcomers poised to take a larger role in advertising. Ad tech companies like The Trade Desk, Media Math, OpenX and Rubicon are increasingly taking over sponsorship of the penthouses and yachts. Amazon, which was officially attending Cannes Lions for the first time this year, had a suite at the InterContinental Carlton Cannes and sponsored a “hackathon” with digital agency Huge.
Other ad tech companies began springing up events in nearby areas. Mobile advertising company Kargo used Facebook’s pier to speedboat people off to nearby Antibes for lunch. Search-based advertising technology company Captify rented a villa about 25 minutes away from the festivities, and threw a pool party with BBQ and “free-flowing chilled rose all day,” the unofficial drink of Cannes Lions.
Many executives noted Spotify, which won Media Brand of the Year, drastically increased their beach size from last year. The company hosted events on and outside the Cannes Croisette, bringing in artists like Miguel, The Killers, Travis Scott and Chvrches. Its position as the go-to hotspot became a worrisome point for other companies, who were stressed out that people may skip their events for Spotify. Even Kylie Jenner was there.
On the other hand, several executives commented on the fact Snap previously sponsored a beach, complete with a Ferris wheel last year. This year it seemed to have a much more meager budget, which made them wonder about the state of the company. One executive, who asked not to be identified, said Snap chief strategy officer Imran Khan told him the company was cutting back on spending.
Snap rented out museum La Malmaison for an art exhibit created in collaboration Christian Marclay called ‘Sound Stories.’ The interactive display involved several rooms where public Snapchat were incorporated into art, including a piano where the sounds were made using Snapchats. Another room featured phones suspended with string, which when you spoke to them matched your pitch and tone with Snapchats.
It was an interesting way to see Snapchats in a creative context—though unfortunately for Snap, Instagram also created an art piece with posts from public Instagram Stories.
To be fair, it’s highly unlikely the two companies knew what each other was planning to bring to the festival. And, Instagram’s exhibit was different. Created by artist Es Delvin, observers sat inside a 360-degree “stage sculpture” of building facades while they watched a 3-minute immersive video installation of the top events of 2018 shared on Instagram Stories.
“Another way Instagram copied Snapchat,” a media executive joked.
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs have heralded innovations like smartphones and car-sharing. Now, Tim Draper, one of the valley’s most successful venture capitalists, wants to similarly shake up the way California is governed by dividing it into three states — “Northern California,” “Southern California,” and “California.”
Last week, Draper and supporters, calling themselves “Cal 3,” submitted enough signatures to have their divide-the-state initiative appear on California ballots in the upcoming midterm elections.
But if they want it to pass, they’ll need to convince voters in California’s other valleys, including the Imperial Valley and the Coachella Valley, that the proposal is more than an out-there idea from an eccentric billionaire.
So far, the proposal has generated backlash on both sides of the aisle. After the initiative qualified for the ballot, both parties’ candidates for governor came out against it. And earlier, in April, SurveyUSA released polling suggesting only 17 percent of the electorate would vote to divide the state in three.
The “Southern California” that Cal 3 proposes would be comprised of 11 counties including San Diego, Orange, Riverside, Imperial and San Bernardino.
Shaun Bowles, a political science professor at University of California-Riverside, said he was worried about the arbitrary manner in which the lines were drawn and how they could affect less affluent parts of California.
“It’s almost like one of those gerrymandered electoral districts we sometimes see. Or maybe a better analogy is that, under this proposed plan, the state is divided into districts, like in The Hunger Games — and we are seen as the Farming District,” he said of “Southern California.”
Out of the three proposed states, “Southern California” would be the poorest, with a per capita income of $43,000, ranked 30th in the nation.
“Northern California,” which would include Silicon Valley, would be the nation’s second-richest state, with a per-capita personal income of $63,000. And “California,” which would include Los Angeles, would be the nation’s 12th-richest state.
Now that Cal 3 will appear on the ballot, its supporters are beginning to reach out to local political activists throughout California, particularly outside Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Cal 3 spokesperson Peggy Grande said.
Although Southern California would be the poorest of the three states, Grande said organizers weren’t worried the proposed division would segregate the rich from the poor.
”We’re not worried that Southern California will suffer. In fact, we believe they will have the greatest opportunity for growth and improvement,” she said.
“California is broken and can’t be fixed on the path that we’re on,” Grande explained, because “it’s too big to function and govern.”
As a result, “So much of the Inland Empire and agricultural areas are being completely ignored by Sacramento,” she said.
Dividing California would localize decision-making to give counties like Riverside and Imperial “a larger seat at a smaller table,” and enable government to address problems facing the state’s education system and crumbling infrastructure, Grande said.
Many of Cal 3’s talking points overlap with those used by Republican candidates for statewide office, who regularly admonish the perils of big government, and describe the state as broken. But Grande said the campaign will also work to sway Democrats who believe the political system leaves many — including the poor and people who live in rural areas — unheard.
“We expect we will receive support from both sides of the political aisle,” she said. “We think that the problems here in California affect everybody from every socioeconomic background and geography and from every demographic. We think the solution should fit everybody.”
It’s hardly the first time Californians have considered slicing up their state. The idea was first proposed in 1859, and there have been more than 200 proposals since, according to the Cal 3 campaign.
In 2014, Draper led efforts to place a proposal on the state ballot that would have have split California into six states. But after the Secretary of State found a portion of the signatures Draper’s group submitted invalid, the initiative was left off the ballot.
And even if the initiative passes, to split up, California would need approval from Congress and the state legislature, according to an analysis by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office.
Cal 3 differs from all previous failed attempts to divide the state because of the way the lines were “thoughtfully created,” Grande said. The three proposed states would have roughly similar population sizes and median household incomes. But the state’s tax revenue, as well as the problems it faces around issues like water scarcity and housing, would not be distributed evenly among the three proposed states.
Joe Rodota, the founder and co-manager of OneCalifornia, a bipartisan group opposed to Cal 3, called the proposal “flawed, goofy, and difficult to take seriously.”
Because of California’s capital gains taxes, Rodota said he worried tax revenue wouldn’t be evenly distributed among the three proposed states, which could hurt “Southern California.”
He also expressed concerns about the potential effects the split could have on the Inland Empire’s economy and higher education system.
Not only would residents of the proposed “Southern California” no longer be in-state students at some of the state’s oldest universities, like UC Berkeley and UCLA, smaller UC schools could also languish.
“What happens when all these other Californians now would have to pay out-of-state tuition to attend UC Riverside? Would they even come? Enrollment in those places could actually collapse,” he said.
In the Inland Empire, where a 2011 study found 20 percent of residents commute to work outside the region, Rodota said, new state lines could reclassify economic activity as interstate commerce and subject it to federal regulation.
“A lot of these transactions across county lines would then happen along state lines and therefore become interstate commerce. What happens in a family where mom works in Los Angeles County and dad works in Riverside?” he asked.
Jonathan Ingram, the Riverside County Republican Party chairman, said he was sympathetic to the concerns Cal 3 based their proposal on, but opposed it because he was concerned the split could never actually be implemented.
As a Republican and a resident of the Inland Empire, Ingram said he understood why the proposal is seductive to people who don’t feel represented in state government. But he said he was more concerned with electing conservative candidates and mobilizing support for proposals like the gas tax repeal, another initiative that will appear on November’s ballot.
“This all has to do with people’s frustration,” he said of Cal 3.
“A multitude of issues have boiled to the top, and people are looking for radical solutions because government is not bringing solutions to the table… Philosophically, it would be great to have three states, but I don’t know if it’s relevant or can be done.”
Annette Gonzalez-Buttner, the chairperson of the Imperial County Democratic Party, said the proposed lines wouldn’t solve her county’s problems because, in “Southern California,” it would just be Orange and San Diego counties dominating the policy priorities rather than Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
Like Ingram, Gonzalez-Buttner also said she was more focused on specific issues than ideas like Cal 3. Regardless of what happens at a state level, she said, “We still have to clean up governance messes of our own creation and fix the problems we can fix,” mentioning education and jobs as two issues of concern to Imperial County Democrats.
Republican State Senator Jeff Stone doesn’t see Cal 3 as a distraction.
“My hope is that having this advisory vote on the ballot will force those leaders who fail to recognize the importance of inland communities to finally pay attention to the hard working people who make it possible for those who live with ocean views to live such a peaceful and tranquil life,” he said in an emailed statement.
Stone said the Cal 3 proposal was “intriguing,” but stopped short of saying whether he was for or against.
“It shows the frustration of people who live outside of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the elite coastal areas have with their state government,” he said.
If you have an Amazon Prime account and you shop at Whole Foods, there are deals and discounts you could be missing out on. Beginning on Wednesday, June 27, Amazon will offer Prime-exclusive deals at every Whole Foods location across the country (select locations have had this for a while now). In addition to perks like free two-hour delivery via Prime Now, your Prime membership can also unlock exclusive deals on select products and extra savings on sale items.
But your cashier won’t automatically know if you’re part of this exclusive club unless you prove your membership status—kind of like Costo, but less exclusive. To ensure you’re saving as much as possible and reaping all the benefits of your Prime membership, keep reading to learn how to unlock Amazon Prime Whole Foods savings. I promise it’s actually super easy.
2 keys to unlock Prime discounts at Whole Foods
There are two different ways to take advantage of savings at the register when you check out at Whole Foods as an Amazon Prime member.
First, you can download the Whole Foods app and have the cashier scan a QR code. Bear in mind this is not something you can access in the Amazon app. If you don’t have the Whole Foods app (available on iOS and Android), you need to install it.
Credit: Whole Foods
The app is the easiest way to see what’s on sale while you shop.
You’ll be prompted to log in with your Amazon account info, automatically linking your Prime account. The app is very straightforward with one tab to access the QR code, one to browse sales, and one to check your account details. If your Whole Foods wasn’t an early adopter, you’ll see the notification below (far left) until Wednesday. But after that, it’ll show a QR code as pictured above.
Credit: Reviewed / Samantha Gordon
The Whole Foods App is pleasantly uncomplicated.
Second, if you don’t want the app or don’t have your phone, you can provide the phone number associated with your Prime account (or with your roommate’s account, you sneaky sneaky). Seems simple, right? It totally is.
Credit: Amazon
On Wednesday, Prime savings will be available at every Whole Foods in the country.
Not sure what number you used? On a desktop browser, log into Amazon, navigate to “Your Account” under the “Accounts & Lists” dropdown menu, and then click on “Login & Security” to find your phone number. In the Amazon app, tap on the menu in the top left corner, choose “Your Account,” and then go to “Login & security,” which should be the first option under the “Account Settings.”
Credit: Amazon
Sync your Amazon account details with your Whole Foods app for easier access.
The Whole Foods app allows you to add a phone number as well, so it’s easy to track donw while you’re in line. You have to sign in to your Amazon account a second time, which is especially annoying if you have a complex password, but it’ll pull the same number that’s linked to your Prime account.
How to find all these exclusive Whole Foods deals
In addition to newly reduced prices on a number of items (thanks to Amazon acquiring Whole Foods int he first place), Prime members get even more discounts and offers than the average shopper. There are weekly offers of everything from produce and meat to frozen foods, baked goods, cleaning products, and more.
Credit: Amazon
Every week, you’ll find exclusive Prime discounts on all sorts of items, from grocery to household.
To find out what’s on sale, you can sign up for emails containing the latest deals and other Prime-exclusive offers. If you don’t want yet another notification popping up on your phone all the time, skip the email and stick with the Whole Foods app. Here, you can browse Prime-exclusive deals any time, even as you shop.
Or, if you like to take chances, you can simply do all your shopping as normal, scan your QR code or input your phone number, and see if you happened across any sale items. You can also reap these benefits by ordering via Prime Now (if it’s available where you are), which is free as long as your order is at least $40.
All the perks of Amazon Prime at Whole Foods:
Weekly Prime-exclusive deals on products across all departments
Extra 10% on sale items with yellow sale signs (excluding alcohol)
Free two-hour delivery in select cities with Prime Now
5% back at Whole Foods Market when you use the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa (typically 3% at grocery stores)
We’ve all been there. Sometimes your food, even if it’s supposed to be fresh, can smell a little… off. LinkSquare has a new gadget that claims it can help! But, can it really tell when your food has spoiled? Reviewed – Mike Roorda, Jackson Ruckar
You’ve probably heard of quantum computing. Do you understand it? Unlikely! It’s time that you did.
The basic idea—tap into quantum physics to make immensely powerful computers—isn’t new. Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman is generally credited with first suggesting that in 1982. But in the past few years the concept has started to become more real.
Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and a pack of startups are all building and testing quantum computing hardware and software. They’re betting that these machines will lead to breakthroughs in areas such as chemistry, materials science, logistical planning such as in factories, and perhaps artificial intelligence.
It will probably be years before the technology is mature enough to be broadly practical. But the potential gains are so large that companies such as JP Morgan and Daimler are already experimenting with early machines from IBM. And you don’t have to be a giant bank or auto maker to play with quantum computing. Both IBM and Rigetti Computing, a startup that opened its own quantum computing factory last year, have launched services to help developers learn about and practice with quantum computing code.
So how do they work? You may have heard that the normal rules of reality don’t always apply in the world of quantum mechanics. A phenomenon known as a quantum superposition allows things to kinda, sorta, be in two places at once, for example. In a quantum computer, that means bits of data can be more than just 1 or 0, as they are in a conventional computer; they can also be something like both at the same time.
When data is encoded into effects like those, some normal limitations on conventional computers fall away. That allows a quantum computer to be much faster on certain tricky problems. Want a full PhD, or third-grade, explanation? Watch the video above.
AT&T is acquiring advertising tech company AppNexus, a move to help it jumpstart future video services with more focused ads.
The media giant, which two weeks ago closed its $85.4 billion deal for Time Warner, reportedly paid $1.6 billion for the New York-headquartered firm.
AppNexus will become part of AT&T’s advertising and analytics business, a division formed a year ago to evolve the company’s digital TV advertising delivery.
“Ad tech unites real-time analytics and technology with our premium TV and video content,” said Brian Lesser, CEO of the AT&T’s ad and analytic’s business, in a statement. “The combination of AT&T advertising & analytics and AppNexus will help deliver a world-class advertising platform that provides brands and publishers a new and innovative way to reach consumers in the marketplace today.”
Terms for the transaction, expected to close during the third quarter of 2018, were not disclosed. But The Wall Street Journal reported the transaction’s value, according to persons familiar with the situation, along with rumors about the deal last week.
AppNexus, which has offices in 26 countries, has a digital ad platform, which can deliver real-time ads to viewers of AT&T’s video offerings, such as the new WatchTV service launching this week. WatchTV is an ad-supported video service, with more than 30 channels, provided free for subscribers to two new AT&T unlimited plans. Others can pay $15 monthly for WatchTV.
By improving its personalized ads delivered to streaming video viewers, AT&T expects to be able to create more, economical video packages for consumers. “Combining AT&T’s incredible assets with our technology, we will help brands and marketers power new advertising experiences for consumers. It’s what the market is asking for, and together we’re poised to deliver it,” said Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus, who co-founded the company in 2007.
Investors in the company, which had filed for an initial public offering in 2016, include Microsoft, News Corp., Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Jupiter looks less like a planet and more like a painting in a new image released by NASA.
The image captures Jupiter’s “chaotic and turbulent” clouds, with swirling formations and several vortices in the giant planet’s northern hemisphere.
The image was taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on May 23 during its 13th close flyby of the planet. Juno was about 9,600 miles from the top of Jupiter’s clouds at the time.
NASA said the bright clouds featured in the image are “most likely ammonia or ammonia and water, mixed with a sprinkling of unknown chemical ingredients,” according to a post detailing the new image.
In the data from Juno’s first eight passes by the planet, the spacecraft’s Microwave Radiometer Instrument (MWR), scientists learned the lightning can be as frequent as it is on Earth. However, where it’s located and how it originates are quite different.
“Jupiter lightning distribution is inside out relative to Earth,” Juno scientist and lead author of the paper Shannon Brown said in a statement. “There is a lot of activity near Jupiter’s poles but none near the equator. You can ask anybody who lives in the tropics — this doesn’t hold true for our planet.”
