Tag: shifts

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Politics

Search shifts from rescue to restoration

Search shifts from rescue to recovery

Search and rescue teams continue to work in the rubble of the collapsed Champlain Towers South apartment in Surfside, Florida on July 6, 2021.

Eva Marie Uzcategui | AFP | Getty Images

Searching the site of a Florida condo building collapse has shifted from a rescue operation to a salvage operation as the likelihood of finding survivors decreases, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon.

For two weeks, rescue teams have spent a painstaking search and rescue effort to find more victims in the rubble of the collapsed Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida. But the possibility of finding someone alive is “near zero,” according to Surfside Charles Mayor Burkett.

Levine Cava also announced that the death toll has risen to 54, of which 86 are not yet known.

“I couldn’t be more proud of our team. The extraordinary men and women from here, at home and from around the world who have given this search everything they have every day,” said Levine Cava.

“At this point we have really exhausted all of the options available to us on the search and rescue mission. Today is about beginning the transition to recovery so we can help finish the families who are suffering and waiting for us. “

The transition from rescue to salvage will be at midnight tonight and will be marked by a moment of silence in front of the construction site with first responders and faith leaders, Levine Cava added.

Search and rescue teams were able to reach areas of the pile that were inaccessible prior to the building’s demolition on Sunday evening without first responders injuring despite difficult conditions at the site, Levine Cava said.

The building was demolished in a controlled demolition on Sunday amid concerns that the standing structure was unstable and could fall on first responders.

Weather conditions cleared Wednesday so rescue teams could continue their search efforts despite initial concerns about having to temporarily suspend work, Levine Cava said in the morning. Forecasters downgraded Elsa from hurricane to tropical storm on Wednesday after hitting land on Florida’s northern Gulf coast.

The emergency management department has received 42 resource requests from citizens affected by Tropical Storm Elsa, with Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez experienced more than 26,000 power outages.

More than 10,000 employees are ready to respond to these failures and provide resources such as water, food and generators, added Nuñez.

After a brief stop to tear down the standing rubble, search and rescue workers will continue to work in the rubble of the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South apartment on July 5, 2021 in Surfside, Florida.

Giorgio Viera | AFP | Getty Images

Surfside Vice Mayor Tina Paul said authorities are working to find long-term housing for survivors of the condominium collapse, many of which are still staying in hotels.

“That is also a priority just to rebuild their lives,” Paul said. “The best way to start is to have a home to call your own.”

Paul added that authorities have received several inquiries from board members and condominium presidents regarding the safety of their buildings. The City of Surfside issued a press release calling for a geotechnical survey of properties more than 30 years old, but Paul said better recommendations are being developed.

Levin Cava also said Miami-Dade County continues to move forward with a 30-day audit that evaluates all four-story residential properties that are 40 years or older and “have not completed the process of identifying and resolving issues.”

The county assessed a total of 40 buildings as part of the audit and identified one building with four balconies that was classified as unsafe according to Levine Cava. While the building was not being evacuated, the balconies were immediately closed.

The remaining portion of the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South Condo building is falling into controlled demolition on July 4, 2021 in Surfside, Florida.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Other cities, like North Miami Beach and Miami Beach, have also started conducting their own audits, she added.

“There will be changes, there will be improvements,” said Levine Cava.

Surfside Mayor Burkett also briefed on Champlain Towers North, the sister building of the collapsed condominium building. Engineers and authorities are currently checking whether it is safe for residents to live on the sister property.

Burkett said it would take several weeks to gather sufficient evidence of structural problems with the building.

The cause of the collapse of the apartment building is still unknown.

Recent evidence shows that the 40-year-old building showed signs of structural damage as early as 2018, with waterproofing problems under the pool and cracks in the underground car park.

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Health

Biden Shifts Vaccination Technique in Drive to Reopen by July 4

Biden Shifts Vaccination Strategy in Drive to Reopen by July 4

WASHINGTON – President Biden, faced with delayed vaccinations threatening his promise of near-normalcy through July 4th, revised its strategy to fight the pandemic on Tuesday, moving from mass vaccination sites to more local facilities to appeal to younger Americans and those who hesitate to get a shot.

In a speech at the White House, Mr Biden said he was launching a new phase in the fight against the coronavirus, with the aim of vaccinating at least 70 percent of adults at least partially by Independence Day, and with a personal appeal to all those who were not vaccinated: “That is Your decision. It’s life and death. “

After three months of tackling supply and distribution bottlenecks, the Biden government faces a problem the president deemed inevitable: many of those most likely to want to be vaccinated have already done so. Vaccination sites in stadiums that were once filled with truckloads of people looking for shots are closing, stating that once they ask for more vaccines, they won’t be able to use all of the doses the federal government wants to ship to them.

However, the government’s own health experts say an additional ten million Americans will need to be vaccinated before the infection rate is low enough to return to what many people consider normal life.

The administration now wants tens of thousands of pharmacies for people to take pictures. It has also ordered pop-up and mobile clinics, especially in rural areas, and plans to allocate tens of millions of dollars to outreach workers in the community to provide transportation and organize childcare for those in high-risk neighborhoods who are want to be vaccinated.

To build confidence in vaccines, federal officials plan to enlist the help of family doctors and other envoys who have trusted voices in their communities.

In a new effort to balance supply and demand, federal officials announced Tuesday that this vaccine would be considered part of a federal pool available to other states who so choose if they don’t get theirs in a given week would order full dose distribution to order more. So far, if states have not been able to order all of their allotted doses on a population basis, they could carry over that supply to the next week.

Mr Biden also announced a new federal website and phone number that will help people find the closest vaccination site. “We will make it easier than ever to get vaccinated,” he promised.

The government is hoping for a surge in vaccinations if the Food and Drug Administration approves the use of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine for adolescents ages 12-15 as expected early next week. The president said adolescents are important in fighting the virus because while they are not as susceptible to serious illnesses, they can still get sick and infect others.

Experts say the United States may never achieve herd immunity. At this point the virus dies because there are no hosts to transmit it. And the president suggested the nation was still a long way from defeating the pandemic.

While the vast majority of seniors have been vaccinated, “we are still losing hundreds of Americans under 65 every week,” Biden said. “And many more get seriously ill at the same time from long distances.” He warned that the nation would vaccinate people in the fall.

Still, the president said that if 70 percent of the nation’s adults have had at least one vaccine by July 4th, “Americans will have taken a serious step toward a return to normal.”

To get there, the government needs to shift the focus from mass vaccination sites to doctor’s offices, pharmacies and other local facilities, and make a far more concerted effort to reach those who are reluctant to take pictures or just find out it’s too much trouble.

“We will move on,” said the president, optimistic that “most people will be convinced of the fact that their failure to receive the vaccine can lead to other people becoming sick and possibly dying.”

Updated

May 4, 2021, 3:12 p.m. ET

As of Tuesday, more than 106 million people in the United States were fully vaccinated and more than 56 percent of adults – or nearly 148 million people – had received at least one shot. This has contributed to sharp falls in infections, hospitalizations and deaths across all age groups, federal officials said.

Despite a flood of available doses, the rate of vaccination has dropped significantly in the past two and a half weeks. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, providers are currently delivering an average of about 2.19 million doses per day, down about 35 percent from the high of 3.38 million on April 13.

Mr Biden called for 160 million adults to be fully vaccinated by July 4 – an increase of 55 million people, or more than 50 percent. About 35 million more adults would have to get at least one shot to reach the president’s target of 70 percent of adults who are at least partially protected. While this next phase of the vaccination effort is “easier because I don’t have to put this massive logistical effort together,” said Mr Biden, “in the other sense it is more difficult, it is beyond my personal control.”

When asked if the United States would help other countries that are worse off, the president promised that by July 4th his administration will have “sent about 10 percent of what we have to other nations.” It wasn’t clear whether he was referring only to doses of AstraZeneca that are not approved for sale in the U.S. or to the country’s entire vaccine inventory. He also promised to act quickly “to get as many doses as possible from Moderna and Pfizer and export them around the world”.

So far, White House officials have stuck to formulas that assign vaccine doses to states by population and have been extremely reluctant to send doses of approved vaccines overseas. The government had been unwilling to move doses to states that could administer it faster, fearing that rural areas or underserved communities would lose to urban or richer areas where residents were more willing to get shots.

As the pace of vaccination slows down, officials have decided that the benefits of a loose system outweigh this risk.

States that want more than their allotment can ask for up to 50 percent more doses, officials said. States that do not claim all of their doses a week will not be penalized and will be able to claim their full allocations the next week, officials said.

The postponement makes little difference to some states that routinely obtained as many doses as the federal government was willing to ship. But it could help some states that can use more than the federal government has shipped.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday the move would give governors more flexibility. “Just a few weeks ago,” she said, “we were at a different stage in our vaccination efforts when supplies were more limited and states largely ordered at or near their full allotment.”

Virginia is a case in point. Last week, for the first time, the state didn’t order every dose it could have, said Dr. Danny Avula, the state vaccination coordinator.

Now he said, “If we can find ways to vaccinate a few people at a time, supply will exceed demand across the state, and work will be much slower and more difficult.” Dr. Avula said the change will “be very helpful to the few states that still have localized areas of high demand.”

Low demand states like Arkansas may find their allotted doses shipped to an alternate location. Arkansas has so far only used 69 percent of the doses it has been given, data shows. Last week, a health ministry spokeswoman said the state had not ordered cans from the federal government. Just over a third of Arkansas adults have received at least one dose, one of the lowest in the country.

Ms. Psaki said the government is working with states to find out which settings make the most sense at this point in the vaccination campaign.

“We’re constantly evaluating the best delivery mechanisms,” she said, “and if something isn’t the most effective, we will make changes.”

Mr Biden suggested that general practitioners and pediatricians play a key role in promoting the vaccination program, as do other community figures. If the Pfizer vaccine is approved for teenagers, the administration plans to make it immediately available to them in about 20,000 pharmacies that participate in the federal vaccination program.

However, some cans are being shipped direct to pediatricians so “parents and their children can talk to their GP and get the shot from a provider they trust most,” the president said. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, said last week that “80 percent of people who try to decide on a vaccine say they want to speak to their doctor about that decision – and we heard that loud and clear. ”

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Business

Remodeled by Covid and Business Shifts, the 2021 Academy Awards Units Off

Transformed by Covid and Industry Shifts, the 2021 Academy Awards Sets Off

LOS ANGELES – A surreal 93rd Academy Awards, a televised stage show about films that mainly go online, began on Sunday with Regina King, a former Academy Award winner and director of One Night in Miami, who performed for Dinner strutted club set.

“It’s been quite a year and we’re still in the middle of it,” she said, citing the pandemic and the guilty verdict in the George Floyd murder trial. “Our love of movies helped us get through.”

With a little more preamble, Oscar statuettes were handed out, and Emerald Fennell, a first-time nominee, won Best Original Screenplay for Promising Young Woman, a startling revenge drama. The last woman to win this category alone was Diablo Cody (“Juno”) in 2007.

“It’s so heavy and so cold,” said Fennell of the gilded Oscar statuette in an impromptu speech that took up one she wrote when she was 10 and loved Zack Morris on the television series “Saved By the Bell.” “You said write a speech. I’m going to have trouble with Steven Soderbergh, ”she said.

Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller won the adapted script award for “The Father” about the devastation caused by dementia. Another Round, about middle-aged men who want to get drunk every day, won an Oscar for International Feature Film (formerly known as Foreign Language Film). The Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg dedicated “Another Round” to his daughter Ida, who was killed in a car accident in 2019.

“Perhaps you’ve pulled some strings somewhere,” said Vinterberg, fighting back the tears.

At the ceremony, there was a possibility that the night might go down in Hollywood history. People of Color were nominated for all four acting awards – an indication that the film industry has made significant reforms. The academy, with around 10,000 members, is still predominantly white and male, but the organization invited more women and people of color to join its ranks after the intense outcry by #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 and 2016, when the incumbent nominees were all white . This year nine of the 20 nominations went to people of color.

As expected, Daniel Kaluuya was named supporting actor for playing the leader of the Black Panther, Fred Hampton, in Judas and the Black Messiah.

“Bro, we’re out here!” Kaluuya shouted solemnly before getting serious and paying tribute to Hampton (“what a man, what a man”) and ending with the cri de coeur: “When they played divide and conquer, we said unite and ascend.”

Hollywood wanted the TV show’s producers to do an almost impossible hat trick. First and foremost, they were asked to create a show that would keep TV ratings from dropping to alarming lows – while also celebrating films that, for the most part, had little audience relevance. The production team, which included Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”), is also hoping to use the television show to start the theater. This is no easy task when most of the world has been at the box office for more than a year. Ultimately, manufacturers had to integrate live camera feeds from more than 20 locations in order to comply with coronavirus security restrictions.

The Academy of Arts and Sciences for Feature Films had postponed the event, which usually takes place in February, to escape the pandemic. Nevertheless, the red carpet had to be radically reduced in size and the extravagant parties canceled.

Updated

April 25, 2021, 9:14 p.m. ET

For the first time, the Academy nominated two women for best director and recognized Chloé Zhao for “Nomadland”, a bittersweet meditation on grief and the American dream, and Fennell for “Promising Young Woman” for the consequences of sexual assault. The other nominated directors were David Fincher for “Mank,” a black and white love letter to Old Hollywood; Lee Isaac Chung for “Minari,” a semi-autobiographical story about a Korean-American family; and surprisingly Vinterberg for “Another Round”.

Zhao had been hailed for her “nomad land” direction by nearly 60 other organizations, including the Directors Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 93 years of the Oscars, only one woman, Kathryn Bigelow, has ever won. (Bigelow was celebrated for directing “The Hurt Locker” in 2010.) The directing category has also been dominated by white men over the decades, which makes the nomination of Chinese Zhao even more significant.

Netflix received its first Oscar nomination in 2014 for The Square, a documentary about the Egyptian revolution. Since then, the streaming giant has dominated the nominations, in large part due to the high spending on price campaigns. It amassed 36 this year, more than any other company, with Mank receiving 10 more than any other film.

But Netflix and its astute price warriors keep snooping in the end.

Last year the company’s hopes were based on The Irishman. Not even one of his 10 nominations was able to convert into a win. In 2019, Netflix pushed “Roma”. It won three Academy Awards, including one for Alfonso Cuarón’s direction, but lost the Grand Prix.

On Sunday, Netflix had two nominees, “Mank” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7”. These films competed with Zhao’s “Nomadland,” a contribution from Searchlight, a division of the Walt Disney Company. The other nominees for best picture were “Sound of Metal”, “Minari”, “Promising Young Woman”, “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “The Father”.

Soderbergh wasn’t your usual Oscar producer, which may make him the perfect pick for this very unusual year. He and his production partners for the event, Stacey Sher and Jesse Collins, avoided Zoom and implemented enough protocols to allow nominees a mask-free environment.

In the run-up to Sunday, Soderbergh repeatedly referred to the show as a three-act film. The television station’s staff included filmmaker Dream Hampton “Surviving R. Kelly” and veteran writer and director Richard LaGravenese (“The Fisher King”). Moderators were referred to as “performers”. These included Zendaya, Brad Pitt, and Bong Joon Ho, last year’s best director winner.

The ceremony usually included performances of the five pieces that were nominated for best song. Not this year. These were brought from the main stage to a preshow that allowed them to be performed in their entirety.

That year, however, the academy decided to hand out two honorary Oscars during the main show. (Since 2009, honorary statuettes have been awarded during a non-televised fall banquet.) The non-profit film and television fund that draws technicians for a nursing home and retirement village for aging and sick “industrial” people (actors, executives, choreographers, lighting) , Cameramen), received one. Founded in 1921 by stars like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, the organization also offers a wide range of other services to Hollywood seniors.

The second went to Tyler Perry, whom the Academy described as “a cultural influence that goes well beyond his work as a filmmaker.” Perry, of course, began his entertainment career as a playwright. Since the end of his popular nine-film series “Madea” in 2019, Perry has focused on producing TV shows such as “Bruh”, “Sistahs” and “The Oval” for BET. He owns a studio in Atlanta.

The Dolby Theater, home to more than 3,000 people and which has hosted the Academy Awards since 2001, wasn’t the epicenter of the television broadcast. That year, an Art Deco Mission Revival train station in downtown Los Angeles served as the main venue and only the nominees and their guests attended.

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Health

U.S. Covid vaccination impediment shifts in direction of lack of demand from scarce provide, warns physician

U.S. Covid vaccination obstacle shifts towards lack of demand from scarce supply, warns doctor

Dr. Carlos Del Rio said US Covid cases could decline dramatically into May as long as the US continues to aggressively vaccinate and convince reluctant communities to get vaccinated.

“I worry … that we are quickly moving our country from a supply problem, a vaccine shortage problem, to a demand problem,” said Del Rio. “I’ll tell you that the most reluctant communities are mostly white evangelicals, and we really need to go to these communities to vaccinate them.”

There are roughly 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. and roughly 45% said they wouldn’t be vaccinated against Covid-19 in late February, which makes them the least likely population group to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.

Half of all American adults have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Of those 65 years old and older, 81% have received one dose or more, and about two-thirds are fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Del Rio, a professor of medicine who specializes in infectious diseases at Emory University School of Medicine, told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that the US may be able to follow Israel’s example and requirements Increasing masking outdoors when transmission in the community drops.

“If we can reduce community transmission to below ten cases per 100,000 population, I don’t think it will be necessary to wear masks outdoors,” said Del Rio.

Host Shepard Smith also asked Del Rio about Texas and those citing the state as an example of successful mask mandate lifting. According to Johns Hopkins University, the average daily Covid cases in Texas have dropped 41% since Governor Greg Abbott lifted the mask mandate 40 days ago. Del Rio noted that there are still many unknowns about Covid and that states should still proceed with caution in lifting Covid restrictions.

“I think sometimes we wonder if a place like Texas is good or happy, and I think it’s luckier than good, frankly,” said Del Rio.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has warned that Americans should still be on guard over Covid.

Categories
World News

GM cuts time beyond regulation shifts at two U.S. truck vegetation as a result of chip scarcity

GM cuts overtime shifts at two U.S. truck plants due to chip shortage

Line workers work on the chassis of full-size General Motors pickups at the Flint Assembly facility in Flint, Michigan on June 12, 2019.

JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP / Getty Images

General Motors this weekend is cutting overtime production at two U.S. assembly plants that are producing their highly profitable full-size pickups due to the ongoing shortage of semiconductor chips affecting the global auto industry.

The plants in Flint, Michigan and Fort Wayne, Indiana make a mix of full-size pickups, including the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra 1500 and their larger siblings.

This is the first time the Detroit automaker has cut production delays on its full-size pickups due to months of chip shortages. GM has significantly reduced production at its auto and crossover plants in North America to give priority to chips for the company’s pickups as well as the company’s full-size SUVs.

This is the latest news. Check for updates again.

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Business

Bollywood, Reeling From the Pandemic, Shifts to Streaming

Bollywood, Reeling From the Pandemic, Shifts to Streaming

“Coolie No. 1 ”has all the hallmarks of a great Bollywood movie: colorful costumes, larger-than-life sets, music and a melodramatic story about a man who pretends to have a twin to woo the woman of his dreams.

After filming in February, the film was set for a theatrical release in May. But when “Coolie No. 1 ”finally hits the screens on Christmas Day, it will not be seen in one of India’s 3,000 theaters. Instead, it will be introduced on Amazon’s streaming service.

“I make films for the theater, but there was no way we could do that this time,” said David Dhawan, the director. After the coronavirus pandemic hit theaters and closed them, the wait for a theatrical debut became unbearable, he said. A deal to send the film to Amazon after its release shifted to a direct streaming plan.

“It’s definitely a compromise,” said Dhawan, whose film is a remake of a 1995 blockbuster of the same name that he also directed. “But at least my film will be released.”

“Coolie No. 1” is just one of the Bollywood films – short for India’s nearly $ 2.5 billion Hindi film industry – that turned to streaming in a pandemic year. A total of 28 big-star Bollywood films that hit theaters were instead streamed direct, compared to none in the past year, according to research firm Forrester.

Among them were “Gulabo Sitabo,” a dark comedy starring veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan, and “Shakuntala Devi,” a biography of the Indian mathematician, both of which began streaming on Amazon in July. Another, “Laxmmi,” a comedy drama starring Akshay Kumar, was released on Disney’s own streaming service Hotstar in November.

The shift is reminiscent of Hollywood, where the pandemic has resulted in studios pushing back theatrical releases for many films and, in some cases, switching to streaming as part of an initial pass. In September, Disney debuted “Mulan” on Disney +. Last month Warner Bros. announced that it would release “Wonder Woman 1984” on HBO Max and in theaters on Christmas Day at the same time. The studio later announced that it would broadcast all 17 of its 2021 films to streaming and theater at the same time.

The number of Bollywood films geared towards streaming is only a small fraction of what the industry is doing. Last year, Bollywood produced more than 1,800 films, or an average of 35 per week, and domestic theatrical releases reached more than $ 1.5 billion in sales, according to a report by Ernst & Young.

However, according to Bollywood producers, filmmakers and experts, the shift in the pandemic towards streaming is unmistakable.

Netflix, Amazon and Hotstar have all invested in India, one of the fastest growing internet markets in the world. The companies, which together have tens of millions of paying Indian subscribers, have poured billions of rupees into producing edgy, India-specific original content in a variety of regional languages. In 2020, they spent nearly $ 520 million creating content for the Indian audience, nearly $ 100 million more than in 2019, according to Forrester.

Netflix said it had invested around $ 400 million in the licensing and production of more than 50 films and shows in India over the past two years. Of these, 34 were original Hindi films.

“The current environment gave us some opportunities to add to our movie roster, including some films our members would otherwise have enjoyed on service after a theatrical release,” Netflix said in a statement. It added that it was “already a huge fan of original films for the service and we are investing in it.”

Disney + also launched in India during the April lockdown and merged with Hotstar, one of India’s largest platforms. (Disney bought Hotstar in March 2019 as part of its $ 71 billion deal to acquire 21st Century Fox, owned by Star India, then Hotstar’s parent company.) The combination gives paid subscribers in India access to Disney’s library global content.

Bypassing theaters is a big step forward to Bollywood. India’s film industry has relied almost entirely on theatrical releases for a long time for revenue. When the pandemic brought cinemas to a standstill, revenues fell by up to 75 percent, according to estimates by analysts at KPMG.

Even after the government reopened cinemas in October, PVR Cinemas, the country’s largest multiplex chain, reported a net loss of 184 crore rupees, or about $ 25 million, for the quarter ended September from a lack of new films.

“Our earnings are miserable because we are still an incomplete offering,” said Ajay Bijli, chairman and general manager of PVR Ltd., which has laid off nearly 30 percent of its employees. “It’s like a restaurant with no food.”

The shutdowns have also resulted in some screen cinemas being permanently closed, which may mean less access to cinema experiences for much of the Indian working class and rural population.

All of this makes it easier for streaming services to land new movies even after some theaters are reopened. There is “the ability to have current theatrical releases available to a large number of customers within four to eight weeks of their release, depending on the language,” said Vijay Subramaniam, Director and Head of Content at Amazon Prime Video India.

Streaming services’ investments in Bollywood content have also resulted in a surge in creativity. Instead of the usual romantic or action hero films with all-star cast members, analysts now say more shows and films are focused on women, war and other topics. More than half of the Netflix films released in India this year were by a producer or director, and over half of Indian films and series have women as the main characters.

“That kind of lowest common denominator or single content strategy is slowly fading now,” said Vikram Malhotra, producer of Shakuntala Devi. “People are demanding more differentiated, more intellectually relevant content. These stories must mean something now. “

Mr. Dhawan, the director of “Coolie No. 1,” said there was still an appetite for big, colorful, melodramatic love stories while streaming.

“I think I’ll make a different type of film every time,” he said. “But people won’t let me change. They return to this great atmosphere, they laugh, they enjoy the sounds, they dance. “

And Sara Ali Khan, who plays the romantic interest, said she was just as thrilled that “Coolie No. 1 ”debuted in streaming as it did in cinemas.

“The excitement and nervousness prior to the film’s release is still there,” she said.

Categories
Health

DeepMind A.I. lab shifts focus from local weather change

DeepMind A.I. lab shifts focus from climate change

Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google’s startup DeepMind for artificial intelligence (AI).

Jeon Heon-Kyun | Getty Images

LONDON – Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory DeepMind has shifted its focus from climate change to other areas of science, pursuing its original mission of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) widely regarded as the holy grail of emerging technology to several people who are familiar with the matter.

While DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for $ 600 million in 2014, denies having shifted its focus, several key climate change researchers who were part of the company’s energy unit have left the company in the past two years and few have Applied some changes. related announcements.

The unit of energy, which has received a fair amount of attention over the years, has gone and none of the company’s employees mention it on their LinkedIn profiles based on CNBC analysis. When asked, a DeepMind spokesperson said, “Over time we’ve moved away from a narrower focus on domains and cross-functional teams in DeepMind are now contributing to our growing climate and sustainability projects.”

They added, “In addition to ongoing partnerships with Google to take advantage of our energy-saving technology, new projects are ongoing in several areas, including more efficient approaches to machine learning.”

One of DeepMind’s early, and perhaps most successful, projects was to cut Google’s huge electricity bill and immediately reduce the company’s carbon footprint. The search giant, technically a sister company of DeepMind as both are operated by Alphabet, announced in July 2016 that it had succeeded in reducing the energy consumption of its data center cooling devices, which are designed to protect Google’s servers from overheating 40 % with the help of a DeepMind AI system.

DeepMind didn’t stop there. It has been working with the Google Cloud department on a new platform that will enable AI control of cooling systems in commercial and industrial facilities.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, said in a blog post in September that DeepMind and Google Cloud are making the platform available to airports, shopping malls, hospitals, data centers and other commercial buildings and industrial facilities worldwide. However, DeepMind and Google Cloud have yet to provide specific examples of where and how the platform is being used.

The DeepMind Energy unit

In 2017, DeepMind began recruiting more experts to Google’s new campus in King’s Cross, London, to investigate how AI can be used to slow the effects of global warming. It formed a new team called “DeepMind Energy” led by Jim Gao, a former Google technical director who co-led the data center project with DeepMind. Gao declined to comment on this story.

DeepMind Energy grew to around 14 people and was commissioned to come up with new AI technologies to combat climate change.

In 2019, DeepMind Energy announced its first big win. It had increased Google’s revenue from its wind farms in the US by around 20%. The wind farms are part of the Google network for projects in the renewable energy sector.

DeepMind’s AI was used to predict the energy output of the wind farms up to 36 hours in advance of actual generation – useful, since energy sources that can be scheduled to deliver a certain amount of energy at a specified time are often larger for the grid Are worth.

While the company’s achievements matter, it has yet to be publicly confirmed where and how the energy-efficient AI has been applied outside of Google’s data centers and wind farms.

National Grid Nightmare?

At one point, DeepMind wanted to use its AI technology to optimize National Grid, which owns and operates the infrastructure that powers homes and businesses across the UK.

“We’re at the early stages of talking to National Grid and other major vendors about how we can investigate the kind of problems they’re having,” said Demis Hassabis, chief executive of DeepMind, in an interview with the Financial Times in March 2017. “It would be amazing if you could save 10% of the country’s energy consumption without new infrastructure, just by optimizing it. That’s pretty exciting.”

In March last year, it emerged that talks between DeepMind and National Grid had collapsed. The organizations spent much of their time working together, sometimes at a National Grid facility near Reading, Berkshire, England. However, there were many hurdles to overcome if anything was ever to be implemented.

Humayun Sheikh, an early investor who backed DeepMind’s launch, told CNBC that commercializing the company’s AI software was difficult, adding that without Google, the company would “likely have failed”.

Sheikh, who claims to have spent five years discussing the idea behind DeepMind with Hassabis before it was recorded, said, “The concern, the question marks, have always been in commercialization. How do you do it?”

Sheikh said National Grid may have had concerns about getting involved in a deal with a large company like Google.

He added, “I don’t think the model that DeepMind or any of those big machine learning and AI companies are using will work … unless it’s delivered as a service. But then the problem is with the data , the GDPR problems. ” The GDPR is a set of data protection and data protection provisions introduced by the European Union in May 2018.

Talks between DeepMind and National Grid eventually failed because they could not agree on the financial details, according to a source familiar with the matter who chose to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the discussion. “The money DeepMind was asking was outrageous,” the source said. “Most of their work is in-house and is billed by Google,” added the source. “They sell the work of their AI engineers at inflated prices and not at the price that the market estimates for their production.”

When asked, a DeepMind spokesperson said, “We looked at the application of AI to optimize the UK’s electricity grid early on. These mutual efforts have been very collaborative and have resulted in many shared ideas on how technology can improve grid efficiency and resilience. These Exploration is now complete and we have no further work planned at this time. “

Gary Marcus, CEO of Robust AI robotics company and co-author of Rebooting AI, which takes a critical look at the industry and suggests how it should evolve, told CNBC that the technology may not have worked well enough for National Grid to do this justify costs.

“Their primary technique, in-depth learning, works best in well-controlled environments like board games and can grapple with the complexities and unpredictability of the real world,” Marcus told CNBC.

Sheikh added, “The technology may not have worked because it wasn’t really that mature.”

National Grid declined to comment.

In a podcast interview published in October, Hassabis reiterated that DeepMind’s AI software “could be applied on a grid scale,” suggesting that he has not given up. “We’d like to try that at some point and save energy on a national level,” he said.

While things did not go according to plan with National Grid in the UK, DeepMind may be looking to hold talks with other governments.

Leave driving forces

With around 1,000 employees, DeepMind’s workforce is divided into those who focus on research and those who focus on applying DeepMind’s AI. Research and publications do not reveal real world problems, which is why the applied branch was established. Like the DeepMind Health division, which was acquired by Google last year, DeepMind Energy is aligned with the applied unit of the company.

The applied unit was headed by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman but left in December 2019 and shocked many colleagues and supporters of the company. Known by friends and colleagues as the “Elk”, the entrepreneur, who has been described by colleagues and the media as an activist and visionary, now has a political role at Google. Suleyman declined to comment.

Several members of the DeepMind Energy team left the company shortly before or after Suleyman left. Gao left the company a few months before Suleyman to found his own start-up with colleague DeepMinder Vedavyas Panneershelvam, while DeepMind Energy’s research engineer Jack Kelly also left to start his own start-up.

The driving forces behind DeepMind’s focus on climate change were Gao and Suleyman, two people with knowledge of the company who preferred to remain anonymous to CNBC due to the sensitivity of the issue. It may be inevitable that DeepMind’s work in this area would slow down after their exits. The DeepMind Energy team that worked on some of DeepMind’s largest climate projects is almost non-existent today.

DeepMind said it had not scaled back its climate change efforts, saying CNBC could not disclose related financial details.

A CNBC source claims Hassabis decided to draw some of the company’s climate protection funds and reassign them to other areas.

Last month, the company announced that it had developed AI software called “AlphaFold” that can accurately predict the structure that proteins will fold into in a few days to solve a 50-year-old “big challenge.” to solve that could solve the problem way to better understanding of diseases and drug discovery. However, some scientists have questioned whether DeepMind “solved” protein folding.

On a call to journalists, Hassabis said, “The ultimate vision behind DeepMind has always been to build general AI and then use it to better understand the world around us by significantly accelerating the pace of scientific discovery.”

A DeepMind spokesperson added, “We’ve made some huge strides and made an impact, including increasing the projected value of Google’s wind power by about 20% and reducing the amount of energy used to cool Google data centers by up to 40% as well overall energy efficiency by 15%. “

“Now Google Cloud is offering this to commercial and industrial customers as a platform solution, helping companies around the world to make their facilities more sustainable.”