The Federal Trade Commission has concluded its investigation into Uber’s privacy practices. “Uber failed consumers in two key ways: First by misrepresenting the extent to which it monitored its employees’ access to personal information about users and drivers, and second by misrepresenting that it took reasonable steps to secure that data,” said FTC acting chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen in a released statement. In a press release, the agency notes that Uber did create a program in 2014 to monitor employees’ use of customer data, but it stopped using it less than a year later. A hack of its systems also shows that driver data became compromised.
The FTC’s probe came after a report last year revealed Uber staffers were spying on ex-partners and celebrities. Now Uber will have to implement a satisfactory privacy program and submit to independent audits every two years for the next 20 years.
This is just the latest call for Uber to clean up its act. The company has seen massive fallout this year after a former employee called out the company for its discriminatory workplace practices. Since then, 20-plus employees have been fired and several executives and board members, including CEO Travis Kalanick, have left. The company is currently tasked with putting the recommendations of two law firms into effect.
On the heels of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s resignation from the American Manufacturing Council, the company is releasing its latest progress report on the diversity of its workforce. This marks the halfway point since Krzanich made a pledge (and a $300 million investment) to get the company to full representation by 2020.
It’s important to note that full representation means that Intel’s target is “market availability,” which measures how many skilled people exist in the external U.S. labor market (drawn from multiple sources, including university graduation data from the National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau) as well as Intel’s own internal market. That means the company is tracking its efforts in hiring, retention, and progression for every job category–both technical and nontechnical–for women, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans.
[Image: Intel]As such, there have been some positive gains since December of 2014 when the gap to full representation was 2,300 employees. Today among about 55,000 employees in the U.S., that gap is down to 801 people, an improvement of 65%.
Other key points:
White and Asian men continue to represent more than 90% of mid to senior technical roles.
There was a 0.3% increase in female representation over last year.
African-American representation is flat across all levels.
There was a 0.1% increase in year-over-year numbers for Native American representation across early career and senior career levels.
Hispanic employee numbers have remained flat, at around 8% at the early career level and slightly higher in mid-career levels.
[Image: Intel]Krzanich and Intel’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Barbara Whye, tell Fast Company that they attribute the gains partly to retention initiatives like the WarmLine, a web-based submission form that employees can use to confidentially report problems, which was launched in the U.S. last spring. The success rate of that program is at 90%.
Nearly half (47.5%) of the total reports from white or Asian men, followed by 34% of white women. “I think that is an okay metric,” Krzanich contends because it’s not just about diversity. “It’s about making an environment inclusive,” he explains. Ideally, he says both groups would use the programs equally to keep things in balance, rather than just giving workers from underrepresented groups priority or special treatment. “As we look at every component,” adds Whye, “We have to be inclusive each step of the way to sustain results.”
[Image: Intel]In light of the current gains, Krzanich is planning to bump up the goal date to 2018.
The gauntlet has been thrown down. Disney says it’s pulling its content from Netflix in 2019 and launching its own streaming TV service. Netflix just poached Shonda Rhimes from Disney-owned ABC. We’re seeing the beginnings of a media Cold War that is likely to define the TV landscape of the 2020s.
But TV is not a “winner take all” kind of war, and a new survey suggests Disney and Netflix may have to share the spoils. Research platform CivicScience asked a representative sample of Netflix subscribers in the U.S. whether they would consider leaving the service if it no longer included Disney content. Out of 848 responses, 15% said they would consider leaving. That might not seem like a big number, but it’s big enough that it should worry Netflix. The company’s subscriber numbers are a closely watched metric, and growth in the United States has already been slowing down. Even if most of those people don’t follow through and actually cancel their Netflix accounts once it becomes Disney-free, a subscriber drop of even a few percentage points would not be a good look for Reed Hastings and company.
[Image: CivicScience]As for Disney, that 15% should also be worrisome, since it could be an early indicator that its competing streaming service won’t enjoy broad appeal across demographics. CivicScience’s survey found that women and parents were more likely to consider dumping Netflix without Disney than men or people without children. Check out the full survey here.
Type “hi” into a new website, and it responds with a low rumble: This is how an elephant gives a casual greeting. The site, Hello in Elephant, uses a database created over decades of research to translate English (or an emoji) into its nearest elephant equivalent.
“At our orphanage in Nairobi, we’re hearing these elephant calls all the time,” says Rob Brandford, executive director of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a nonprofit that rehabilitates orphaned elephants for release to the wild. The nonprofit realized that letting the broader public listen to elephant vocabulary might inspire more support for their conservation.
The site is based on 40 years of research led by Joyce Poole, who has recorded and analyzed thousands of elephant voices with her cofounder and team at an organization called ElephantVoices. “As they’re recording sounds, they’re taking notes of exactly what the elephants are doing at that point in time,” says Brandford. “Are they in a group, are they youngsters, are they in a drought? They’re looking at all these different variables so that they can go back and analyze the sound database.”
“Are they in a group, are they youngsters, are they in a drought? They’re looking at all these different variables so that they can go back and analyze the sound database.” [Photo: courtesy David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust]Rough translations include elephant versions of “Let’s go,” “I’m annoyed,” “I love you,” and “I’m miserable,” demonstrating the depth of an elephant’s emotional life. “They’re extremely similar to us in terms of their emotional capacity and how emotionally sophisticated they are,” he says. “Elephants do demonstrate humor, they’re self-aware, they experience joy. They experience grief, which is extremely rare in other animals apart from ourselves.”
The team hopes to spark new interest in elephants with the site. There were more than 10 million African elephants around 100 years ago; now there are fewer than 400,000, and in seven years, that number is projected to drop to 190,000. Poaching is one major cause of the decline–an average of 70 elephants are poached each day, far more than the birth rate–and growing development in Africa is another. On routes that wildlife would traditionally take to reach water, new communities or infrastructure like roads are often in the way.
“Elephants do demonstrate humor, they’re self-aware, they experience joy. They experience grief, which is extremely rare in other animals apart from ourselves.” [Photo: courtesy David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust]To respond to that development, the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust works to acquire new land for conservation. (The routes are sometimes protected by fences lines with beehives, since bees terrify elephants and keep them from crossing; the beehives also provide local communities with honey and a reason to keep the fences in repair.) When it rehabilitates orphaned elephants, the organization returns them to a national park that it protects with anti-poaching teams and mobile vets. These efforts can help sustain populations, but the organization hopes to increase the scale of its reach.
The key, they say, is increasing interest in elephant conservation now, since the elephant population–and their language–is dwindling so quickly. “This language is in danger,” says Brandford. “We know so little about a species that actually, in our lifetime, might be gone. There’s so much more to learn. We’re not going to get that opportunity unless people get excited about the species.”
Taylor Swift won her years-long legal battle on Monday against a DJ who reportedly grabbed her butt during a photo shoot before one of her concerts in 2013. The DJ, David Mueller, who was 51 to Swift’s 23 at the time, was fired shortly after Swift complained to his employer. He then sued her for $3 million, at which point Swift countersued for $1. A jury decided in her favor.
The fact that she even went to trial is a mark of her privilege. It’s something most women never do. The kind of unnerving and disturbing incidents that happened to Swift happen daily to thousands of women. They have, in fact, happened to so many women on their daily commutes that many cities’ subway systems have implemented routine announcements about it. Something similar to what happened to Swift has likely happened to someone you know. It’s happened to me, and like most women, I never took the creep to trial.
Swift’s trial offers a glimpse at why most women don’t pursue these cases.
Mueller’s attorney Gabe McFarland asked Swift why the photo shows the front of her skirt in place, not lifted up, if Mueller was reaching underneath to grab her butt. “Because my ass is located in the back of my body,” Swift replied. She offered a similar response when asked whether she saw the grope taking place. When McFarland pointed out that the photo shows Swift closer to Mueller’s girlfriend than Mueller himself, Swift answered, “Yes, she did not have her hand on my ass.”
Wasn’t Swift critical of her bodyguard, who didn’t prevent such an obvious assault? [asked McFarland] “I’m critical of your client sticking his hand under my skirt and grabbing my ass,” she told the attorney. But, McFarland said, Swift could have taken a break in the middle of her meet-and-greet if she was so distraught. “And your client could have taken a normal photo with me,” Swift countered.
Swift is white, wealthy, and has millions of fans who publicly support her, and her credibility was still repeatedly challenged. Most women don’t have the resources that she has; they know that they likely wouldn’t be successful in similar cases. And they know that even if they are, they’ll face legal fees, time off work, and have their credibility similarly questioned.
To that end, Swift released a statement following her court victory yesterday. It read in part:
I acknowledge the privilege that I benefit from in life, in society, and in my ability to shoulder the enormous cost of defending myself in a trial like this. My hope is to help those whose voices should also be heard. Therefore, I will be making donations in the near future to multiple organizations that help sexual assault victims defend themselves.
Until the speech, Trump had offered little more than a feeble, wildly unpresidential condemnation of violence on “many sides,” a remark that was roundly criticized on both sides of the aisle. But should we really be surprised? Trump’s tenure as president has been riddled with anemic responses to terror attacks, both domestic and international.
Below, we’ve compiled some of his most damning responses–and non-responses–since he took office in January.
Quebec City Mosque Shooting, January 2017
Response time: Never
Trump gave no public comment after an attack that claimed the lives of six people at a mosque in Quebec City. (He did make a call to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offering his condolences.) Kellyanne Conway defended Trump, noting that he “doesn’t tweet about everything” but was “sympathetic to any loss of life.”
Kansas Bar Shooting, February 2017
Response time: Less than a week
Trump was completely silent after a racially motivated shooting occurred that killed an Indian man and injured another at a bar outside Kansas City. Six days later, he addressed the incident in passing—along with recent instances of anti-Semitic vandalism—during his first address to Congress:
Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.
Trump is usually more forthcoming in his responses to attacks that he can attribute to “radical Islamic terrorism.” On April 20, a gunman opened fire on the Champs Élysées in Paris and killed a police officer; ISIS took credit for the attack.
Trump addressed the incident and extended his condolences when asked about it during a news conference with Italy’s prime minister. He also took to Twitter the next day:
Another terrorist attack in Paris. The people of France will not take much more of this. Will have a big effect on presidential election!
Trump was quick to respond after a bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester killed 22 and injured almost three times as many people. (Again, ISIS took credit for the attack.) He dubbed the perpetrators “evil losers” in a news conference the next day:
So many young beautiful innocent people living and enjoying their lives, murdered by evil losers in life. I won’t call them monsters because they would like that term. They would think that’s a great name. I will call them from now on losers because that’s what they are. They’re losers, and we’ll have more of them. But they’re losers. Just remember that.
Two men were attacked and killed on a train when they tried to silence an anti-Muslim rant against two women, one of whom was wearing a hijab. (A third man was injured but survived.) Trump was silent on the issue for three days, after which the official POTUS Twitter account sent out the following tweet:
The violent attacks in Portland on Friday are unacceptable. The victims were standing up to hate and intolerance. Our prayers are w/ them.
Trump also issued a distasteful tweet in which he misconstrued comments made by London mayor Sadiq Khan; later, he doubled down on his criticism of Khan. This is something of a pattern—but perhaps that’s not much of a surprise, given that Khan is the city’s first Muslim mayor.
Minnesota Mosque Bombing, August 2017
Response time: Never
Ten days after a bomb exploded at a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, Trump has said nothing. Given his usual response time—and his unprecedented comment on the Charlottesville riots—it’s safe to assume that Trump won’t spend any of his precious characters addressing this.
Meanwhile, he has said this:
Made additional remarks on Charlottesville and realize once again that the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied…truly bad people!
Fox News executives have some questions to answer about a video posted to the Fox Nation section of its website in January. The headline reads “Here’s A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To Block The Road [VIDEO],” and beneath it, a caption tastelessly asks readers to “Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years.” Prominent Twitter users such as Jessica Valenti, Parker Molloy, and Matt Binder have been sharing screenshots and archival links to the post for the past hour. The post seems to have originally come from the far right-leaning website Daily Caller. It has since been removed from Fox Nation. Placing this macabre caption on such a video would have been in poor form at any time; in the aftermath of Charlottesville, however, it calls into question the values of both news organizations.
In the wake of this weekend’s deadly, racially charged demonstrations in Virginia, more top business leaders have cut formal ties with President Trump. If you’re keeping track, executives from Merck, Under Armour, and Intel have all announced they would stop advising the president because of Trump’s inability to formally call out nazis and white supremacists.
Expect it to continue: Today President Trump held a press conference that will surely only add kindling to this fire. He was visibly defensive, and compared the desecration of Confederate monuments to those depicting George Washington. Instead of flat-out denouncing white supremacy, Trump called out the left as well–essentially saying the “alt-left” had as much blame in this weekend’s violence as the racist groups that held the rally.
“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch,” he said. He went on: “I think there’s blame on both sides, and I have no doubt about it.”
Sources are telling media outlets that Trump went very off script:
Blind quote of the day: “That was all him — this wasn’t our plan” – a senior WH official tells @jeffzeleny of Trump
Given the already-tenuous relationship Trump has had with leaders in the technology and business communities, we imagine more formal CEO departures soon. Expect some follow-up posts soon.
“Fascist” is often an epithet used to demean an opponent, but for alt-right organization Vanguard America, it’s a badge of honor. As of last night, the group lacks a website where it can proclaim that message. Going to its URL bloodandsoil.org leads to a message from site host WordPress that reads, “This blog has been archived or suspended in accordance with our Terms of Service.”
That’s somewhat surprising. A few months ago, I asked WordPress about its hosting of Vanguard America, United Dixie White Knights of the KKK, and several other far-right organizations for a story about hate sites and their tech providers. The stock answer was that WordPress and its parent company Automatic do not censor, period.
Vanguard America’s website as of last night.
WordPress hasn’t explained the shift in its approach to Vanguard America: The company’s user agreement and terms of service have not changed since Charlottesville. Similarly, Facebook, Google, and other platforms that have recently sought to block similar content have done so even as their policies have remained the same.
For WordPress, the about face was prompted by the group’s participation in last weekend’s Unite the Right rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which a car drove into a crowd, killing one person, Heather Heyer, and injuring 19. The driver, James Alex Fields, who has been charged with murdering Heyer, has claimed allegiance to Vanguard America. The group denies that Fields was a member, but membership is an amorphous thing in the alt-right movement, in which people affiliate loosely with causes, sometimes just by visiting websites and joining discussion groups.
The website’s content—including posters, articles, and a manifesto—may fall into the “directly threatening material” forbidden by the company’s user agreement. But the agreement also notes, “These are just guidelines—interpretations are solely up to us.” WordPress has not yet responded to a request for comment.
An archived version of the Vanguard America website as it appeared yesterday.
(The group still has a Twitter account that was switched to private this afternoon and a YouTube channel; its Instagram channel is no longer available. A cached version of bloodandsoil.org—based on an old Nazi slogan—is still available via Google.)
A New Approach?
For WordPress to drop a site, even a fascist site, is a very big deal; the same is true of GoDaddy and Google’s decisions to drop their registration of neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer (another site that GoDaddy previously said would be permitted on free speech grounds). Many tech platforms have long stood by strict neutrality and freedom of expression. That may now be changing.
At least when the public can see what’s happening. A free Whois lookup of its domain name reveals a site’s registrar, which is why activists were able to pounce on Google so quickly when the Daily Stormer tried to switch registrars. But Vanguard America was unusual among far-right sites in that its host, WordPress, was plain to see. Many sites—including organizations worried about hackers, like Nasdaq and OKCupid, as well as affiliates of ISIS and the KKK—use security provider Cloudflare to protect against attacks and hide their true host. Over objections from some activists, Cloudflare has been steadfast in not dropping any clients, other than in cases of serious criminal activity.
Following an incendiary, apparently impromptu press conference at Trump Tower late this afternoon, Donald Trump is facing major criticism yet again. His series of comments including a doubling-down on Saturdays controversial “on many sides” condemnation of Charlottesville participants, and a comparison of Robert E. Lee to George Washington. The reaction to this press conference has been swift and brutal, with at least one fresh departure from Trump’s manufacturing council, and some rare criticism from Fox News. Perhaps the most explicit response to the speech came in the form of a Wikipedia editor who added Donald Trump’s name to the list of Presidents of the Confederate States of America. The change only lasted a brief while before it was taken down, but the internet, of course, is forever.
Why we care: Yes, this was released in June. And yes, it was made for New Zealand. But given the truly surreal reaction by President Trump, his surrogates, and right-leaning pundits to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, it also feels incredibly relevant to the U.S. right now.
Waititi tweaks the typical PSA format to illustrate that it’s not just the losers waving swastikas in Charlottesville that are the problem. Even those who feed it a little, like, say, equating neo-Nazis and white supremacists to those that oppose them, help the cause of racism a great deal. It is important to remember that not all racists are as obvious as the armed and dangerous Cro-Mag in that excellent Vice report, some can only be seen by their silence or flailing attempts at justification.
Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump held an apparently impromptu press conference at Trump Tower, during which he doubled down on the idea that there were “many sides” at fault for the deadly violence in Charlottesvile over the weekend. If anything, the rhetoric he used while answering reporters’ questions was even more inflammatory than his remarks on Saturday, which drew seething criticism for their vagueness in condemning white supremacists–and completely eliminated any whiff of goodwill Trump may have accrued from eventually calling out the KKK and neo-Nazis on Monday.
Here’s how each late-night talk show fared in covering the press conference.
Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Colbert’s show lead the charge with an epic monologue about Trump’s remarks. The host starts off presenting the president with a homemade Hallmark card, which would look not out of place in Trump’s Good Headlines folder, wishing him “Happy Belated KK-Kondemnation.” Then, over the course of nearly 13 fiery minutes, he attacks practically every eye-popping quote from the press conference, from the idea that Trump usually “waits for the facts” before condemning things, to the president’s complaints about how the sigh fake news reacted to his initial comments on Saturday. One of his most important points, however, is one he makes about the so-called “alt-left,” a phrase which is about to be absorbed into the vocabulary of Racist Uncles everywhere, right next to Fake News. “The opposite of alt-right isn’t the alt-left,” Colbert declared, “it’s the not-Nazis.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Jimmy Kimmel starts off his monologue by describing all things he and his writers had planned for the show before the press conference rendered them moot. They apparently had bits about topics like Bachelor in Paradise and Uggs all ready to go. Instead of those jokes, however, Kimmel and Co. pivoted to covering Trump’s press conference. The host goes on to say Trump’s doubling down about “both sides” was like if Mike Tyson had bitten off Evander Holyfield’s other ear off after biting off the first one.
Kimmel then goes off on a tangent equally as long and thoughtful as Colbert’s, culminating in a direct plea to Trump voters to come to terms with what they’ve done. “You don’t want to admit that these smug, annoying liberals were right,” he says. “It’s the last thing you want to do. But the truth is–and deep down inside you know you made a mistake, you know this is true–you made a mistake. You picked the wrong guy.”
Considering that Kimmel is one of the less explicitly political late-night hosts of today, many Trump voters likely received the message. Whether it had any impact on them, however, one can only guess.
Late Night with Seth Meyers
The all-star of Monday night’s reactions to Charlottesville, Seth Meyers spent only a brief two minutes on Trump’s press conference last night. In a segment entitled “Breaking Crazy”–which is either a reference to how late in the day the event had occurred, or to Breaking Bad–Meyers concludes that Trump is acting like “a bad waitress at a crappy diner who’s trying to get fired so she can go to a concert.”
The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon
Although Jimmy Fallon didn’t directly address the press conference on his Tuesday night episode, it’s worth watching his near-tearful reaction to Charlottesville, which aired on Monday night.
Alexa skills have always been free on devices like the Amazon Echo, but that’s not stopping Amazon from paying skill developers anyway. In May, Amazon quietly began rewarding developers with cash for making popular games and trivia skills. Now the company is publicizing the program and expanding it to more categories, including education and reference, food and drink, health and fitness, lifestyle, music and audio, and productivity.
Still, the criteria for getting paid are vague. Amazon says it determines which skills are the most popular with “a variety of metrics, such as minutes of usage, new customers, and other measures of engagement,” but hasn’t specified how those metrics translate into cash. It’s also unclear how much money Amazon intends to pay out overall. Presumably the rewards will be a drop in the bucket for larger companies whose skills are tied to broader business models–think OpenTable or Fandango–but it could motivate smaller developers to give Amazon’s voice platform a shot, or improve the skills they’ve made already.
Autonomous vehicles are often discussed as a foregone conclusion–when we talk about “the car of the future,” that is what we imagine. But Jonathon Keats, a conceptual artist and experimental philosopher who “often takes the contrarian position,” as he tells Fast Company, thought: What if it’s not? And then, if the car of the future is not driverless, what is it?
It might, Keats suggests in his newest concept artwork, be what he calls driverful. Keats has developed a vision for a car that’s as integrated with our beings as our phones have become–a car that responds sensitively, in real time, to our own emotional and physical states, rather like a piece of wearable tech that encloses our whole being.
“In the case of transportation, it becomes less about the car and more about you wanting to get from point A to point B.” [Photo: LACMA Art + Technology Lab]The Roadable Synapse, as Keats has called his creation, was developed in collaboration with Hyundai Ventures and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art and Technology Lab, and will be on display at LACMA beginning August 17. (Keats previously worked with LACMA in 2015 to develop a fashion-wearable mashup that adjusted to the wearer’s mood and self-perception.) Though technically a concept, the Synapse, built into a 2017 Hyundai Ioniq with the help of Hyundai engineer Ryan Ayler, is fully operational. Visitors to the exhibit will be able to sit in the driver’s seat and experience the extent of the automotive universe Keats has imagined.
Keats, by trade, spends a lot of time in the realm of “what if?” His other concept artworks have centered around questions like: What if plants could watch movies and enjoy fine cuisine, in the form of, respectively, videos of bees pollinating and “gourmet sunlight”? What does watching another species undertake an experience we regularly participate in tell us about our own behaviors? Keats possesses a simultaneously curious and agnostic sensibility, and operates around the idea that “the absurd is a really powerful tool.” His work pushes right up to the edge of our empathy and perception, and, he hopes, right through it. “I try experimentally to undertake philosophy by creating alternate, immersive environments that people can enter into and collectively sort out what the meaning might be, and see what sort of questions come up that might be even larger than the questions I had in the first place,” he says.
“There’s a degree to which the vehicle almost disappears from the equation.” [Photo: LACMA Art + Technology Lab]It was with that same sort of immersive curiosity that Keats began thinking about something that–at least for the time being–feels rather foreign and unknowable to most of us: the self-driving car. The way Keats sees the tension between driverless cars and his Roadable Synapse is incapsulated by a larger debate around the direction of technology itself. On the one hand, there’s artificial intelligence, which is designed to function in such a way that the technology almost becomes invisible. “In the case of transportation, it becomes less about the car and more about you wanting to get from point A to point B,” Keats says. “There’s a degree to which the vehicle almost disappears from the equation.”
And then there’s the idea of a cyborg future, resuscitated from the tomes of 1960s science fiction and transmuted into smartphones and wearables. Easy access to the web, Keats says, augments memory in such a way that almost renders us cyborgs, though we do not yet look like we’ve wandered off the set of Bladerunner.
Cramming in more beats per minute, Keats says, mimics the effect of driving faster. [Photo: LACMA Art + Technology Lab]If driverless cars are on the side of AI, Keats, in a 2015 meeting with John Suh, the director of Hyundai Ventures and an advisor to LACMA’s Art and Technology Lab, expressed an interest in exploring cars’ cyborg manifestation.
“What that would entail would be an increasingly interconnected relationship between the car and the driver, where the ultimate version of this would be that the car becomes the driver’s body, and the driver becomes the car’s mind,” Keats says.
It’s pretty straightforward, in theory at least, how to accomplish the latter: Brain-computer interfaces, Keats says, could be developed to translate a thought (“make a left!) into an action (the car turns left). But how to make the car into the driver’s body was less clear.
The first step, Keats says, would be to manipulate the sound system to situate the driver in the physical experience of the car. To incorporate a fact culled from his research–that time seems to move more slowly when you’re more stimulated–Keats and Ayler figured out a way to increase the tempo of the music along with the speed of the car. Cramming in more beats per minute, Keats says, mimics the effect of driving faster–you’re passing by and processing more units of the world as the vehicle’s speed increases. Anemometers located on either side of the car’s exterior will adjust the music volume feeding into the left and right ears in accordance with outside activity, to give the driver a sense of how the car is moving through the world. Raw volume is correlated with the acceleration and deceleration of the car. In the Roadable Synapse, the driver supplies the music (any genre works), but the car manipulates those sound factors in accordance with how it’s operating.
“There’s some evidence in the literature that gastric motility–externally mimicking the effect of a rumbling stomach–and cooling the stomach make you feel hungrier.” [Photo: Jonathon Keats]Keats is also experimenting with a hardware that will be built into the seatbelt to make the driver feel hungrier as the car’s fuel goes down. “There’s some evidence in the literature that gastric motility–externally mimicking the effect of a rumbling stomach–and cooling the stomach make you feel hungrier,” Keats says.
It’s invasive, and it’s meant to be. By demonstrating how tightly we can wind the screws between man and car, Keats wants to force a reckoning with where we draw the line between ourselves and our technology, and how tightly or loosely we circumscribe our agency. For the time being, the Synapse is a thought experiment, but it’s one that allows us to test out our future relationship with technology before it arrives. “By prototyping and putting the cyborg approach out there as the alternate car of the future, it opens up the space for us to discuss the future of technology and transportation in a way that is speculative and nonbinding,” Keats says.
Chances are good that you’ve noticed an influx of cooking videos flooding your Facebook and Instagram feeds. Those overhead, hyper-lapsed tutorials that give you the crash-iest of courses on how to cook a dish have become an inescapable trend. For example, BuzzFeed’s Tasty, the undeniable leader in this space, has generated about 34 billion views across multiple platforms in its two-year existence, according to social video analytics company Tubular Labs.
As popular as these videos may be, the one thing they lack for David Ma is artistry.
“That’s not to knock these videos–I think that they are very hypnotic. You look at those videos and you just want to share them with your friends,” Ma says. “They serve a very functional purpose, but a little bit of the art gets lost in there.”
For five years, Ma worked as a creative in agencies including Droga5 and TBWA\Chiat\Day but broke away to focus on commercial directing. Being the foodie that he is–with a popular, food-centric Instagram to back up his cred–it was only a matter of time before his agency skills in thinking conceptually would collide with food in a major way. While scrolling through Instagram one night, Ma came across one of those food tutorials and thought to himself, “What would this look like if Michael Bay shot it?”
“Whenever I shoot food, I’m always looking to come at it from an unexpected angle or to shoot something differently than what is being done,” Ma says. “And I just thought to myself, what would Michael Bay do with a recipe video and how would he amp that up to Bayhem?”
But Ma didn’t stop with Michael Bay. He soon found himself pondering how a number of filmmakers known for their iconic aesthetics would tackle making pancakes, spaghetti, and s’mores. Ma pulled an all-nighter sketching storyboards that have evolved into “Food Films,” a stylized tutorial series featuring treatments à la Bay, Quentin Tarantino, Alfonso Cuarón, and Wes Anderson.
Over the course of two and a half days in a Brooklyn studio, Ma and his team of friends and friends of friends worked to execute his vision that one of his mentors helped to bring into focus.
“When I made the switch to directing, [my mentor] always told me to make the kind of work that I want to get paid to do one day. And ultimately, I want to continue making videos that feel cinematic and that feel interesting,” Ma says.
Part of creating that cinematic feel meant employing a heavy dose of movie magic, particularly for “Pancakes.”
“It really challenged my prop master to figure out a way to bring these things to life without it feeling fake–and we didn’t have a big visual production budget,” Ma says of his self-funded project. “We kept a lot of the effects practically in-camera and that involved getting creative with building a latex trampoline that would launch things in the air for us to shoot at 2,000 frames per second and then reversing the footage so it looked like it was floating. Or ripping off the speaker lining of a subwoofer, pouring maple syrup into it, and playing dubstep so that we can capture these streams of syrup coming up into the air.”
Ma is already in the process of storyboarding season two of “Food Films” with a few brands and editorial outlets that have expressed interest in collaborating. However, whether or not “Food Films” reaches the viral load of a company like Tasty, Ma feels like he’s already accomplished what he set out to do.
“The ultimate goal of Food Films was to get people to look at stuff from a different way,” Ma says. “I think that when you show the intricacies of a marshmallow, you kind of appreciate that marshmallow–when you treat it like one of Wes Anderson’s characters it makes people look at it differently.”
In the wake of the white nationalist rally held Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the president’s apparent inability to pick a side in the Nazis vs. humans debate, many people are struggling to make sense of the world during seemingly senseless times. Solange—ever the trendsetter—has deleted her Twitter account, after writing one last mic drop-worthy tweet, Pitchfork reports.
On August 15, the singer sent out a tweet, saying that she was going to “delete Twitter soon.” Before she left, though, she wanted to know, “What we got to do to get my new hero Takiyah Thompson free?”
Thompson is a 22-year-old student who was arrested for pulling down a Confederate monument in Durham, North Carolina, and charged with two felonies and two misdemeanors, including participating in a riot with property damage and inciting others to riot, and damage to real property.
After posting that final missive, Solange posted on Instagram, in a note that has since been deleted, that she has “been trying to practice self preservation during this time,” and deleting Twitter with one final “fuck nazis” is probably a great way to preserve sanity during these times.
Depending on your definition, self-proclaimed free-speech warriors or jurisprudence-ignorant snowflakes have been planning to protest the firing of former Google engineer James Damore, who wrote and published the internal memo that questioned the company’s diversity efforts using both false equivalences and pseudoscience about gender. The so-called “March on Google” was planned for nine cities as a way to fight free speech (despite the fact that this is very clearly not a free speech issue).
Never mind it all, because the protest is now postponed. On the event’s website, the organizers wrote that they had to cancel it for now due to “Alt Left terrorist threats.” What is the alt-left? Well it’s a term, now used by President Trump, to describe the amorphous groups of people who oppose hate speech coming from the far right and white supremacists.
The protest’s organizers write that, despite the “threats,” they hope to reschedule a march in the coming weeks.
Yet that won’t stop hate from coming to your cities. Beyond this “March on Google,” far right and white supremacist groups are reportedly planning rallies in both Boston and San Francisco in the coming weeks. Mayors for both cities have denounced the planned events. Boston mayor Marty Walsh said plainly that the city will “not tolerate incitements to violence.” Hopefully before another tragedy occurs, these event organizers will also feel the sway of the alt-left and cancel their events, too.
Your deadline’s one week away, and there’s no way you’re going to hit your goal. And it’s all because the results you need aren’t in yet–because of a client, or delayed data, or your own timeline being unrealistic.
Anyone who’s ever been about to miss a target or goal knows how much it sucks to inch closer and closer to that deadline–knowing they’re going to fail at what they set out to do (or more realistically, what their boss asked them to do).
Before you panic, walk yourself through the following steps:
1. Determine How Much Of The Stress Is Coming From You–And How Much Is Coming From Your Boss
You’re an incredibly motivated professional–and if I were to take a guess, there are times when you put a lot of pressure on yourself. When that happens, self-imposed deadlines start appearing on your to-do list, even though your manager has a much different idea in mind.
Take a deep breath and figure out where this deadline pressure’s coming from.
If it’s self-imposed, I’m going to suggest something radical: Give yourself a break. The only person who’s bearing down on you is, well, you. So if there isn’t a hard deadline, don’t feel the need to add extra pressure to your own to-do list.
But if you have a target from your company or your boss to hit, things aren’t quite as simple. That’s not to say you’re not working hard, but it does indicate that you need to continue reading . . .
2. Figure Out If There Are Any Changes You Can Make
I’ll be honest. Sometimes I think I’m trying everything possible to get the results I need–only to realize that I keep relying on the same tactics with slightly different spins. Sound familiar? That’s why it’s important to take a minute to reevaluate your methods and figure out if you can do things a little differently.
Maybe you need to reorganize your to-do list for this project (or if you’re completely disorganized, maybe it’s time to get organized, period). Maybe there’s a knowledge gap you didn’t know you have and you need to take a step back. Maybe you need to ask for help.
Whatever the case may be for you, be honest with yourself about how you can shift gears in order to get what you need.
3. Communicate What’s Going On To Everyone Involved
This part is often one of the most difficult for self-starters like you. Not only is it important to figure out what needs to change for your sake, but you also need to get everyone else it affects up to speed.
Call a meeting (or send an email) to the appropriate people and give them a status update. But wait–don’t approach this as a plea for an extension or additional help. Bring your adjusted timeline, and if relevant, proposed solutions as well.
Not only does it make it much easier for everyone else to chime in with suggestions, but it also shows them that even though you feel that you’re behind, you’re doing everything in your power to catch up as quickly as possible.
At some point, everyone faces the challenge of fighting through obstacles to hit a goal. Even though you’re good at your job, you’ll likely find yourself struggling to figure out why your progress has stalled. While you might not be seeing results as quickly as you (or your boss) would have liked, you can still totally rebound.
Your old faithful delivery guy could soon be replaced by a cooler on wheels. DoorDash is deepening its investment in robot-enabled delivery through a new partnership with Marble, which makes large self-driving containers. The company has big ambitions to be more than just a food delivery tool.
“Catering is a big market we’ve been going after,” says cofounder Stanley Tang. In addition to large orders, the pilot will also test the robots as moveable hubs around San Francisco. Marble robots will pick up orders from multiple restaurants and then meet Dashers, as the company’s contract delivery people are known, who will take the orders to a final destination.
DoorDash first started testing automated delivery with a company called Starship. The experiment ferried food short distances in Washington, D.C., as well as Redwood City, Sunnyvale, and San Carlos in California. You may remember Jimmy Kimmel using it to order wings from Hooters, but just in case you forgot, here’s the video:
