Electric vehicles are still just a glimmer at the edge of the automobile market: They make up less than 1% of all cars sold in the U.S. But fast forward to the year 2040, and they’re expected to dominate–a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates they’ll account for 54% of sales in just three decades. This rapid growth, though, begs a question: Where are the batteries going to come from?
Right now, in the U.S., the answer would be Tesla. Out of a 3,000-acre facility on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, Elon Musk’s Gigafactory will, by next year, be churning out 35 gigawatt-hours per year of lithium-ion batteries for both EVs and stationary structures like homes and businesses. Musk is hinting at building three more such factories. The Tesla Gigafactory is designed to supply enough batteries to meet the demand created by Tesla vehicles, but for other EV manufacturers, the supply chain between battery production and vehicle is not as clear.
“Everybody else is focused on doing the whole car–we’re just doing battery packs.” [Photo: courtesy Romeo Power]With the EV industry set to be valued at $32 billion by 2020, and with EV batteries on track to become a $240 billion industry in the next 20 years, Romeo Power, an energy storage company founded around a year and a half ago in the greater Los Angeles area, is looking to give Tesla some competition. Founded by Michael Patterson, a serial tech entrepreneur, and Porter Harris, a veteran of the battery industry who developed spacecraft power packs for Musk’s SpaceX operation and who holds several patents in the field, Romeo started selling its battery packs earlier this year, and finishing touches on its 113,000 square foot, fully automated manufacturing facility near downtown Los Angeles are slated to be completed by the end of this year, making it the second gigafactory (a term originally coined by Tesla, but now often co-opted to mean: massive battery-production facility) to open in the U.S.
Romeo currently has just over a dozen paying customers, ranging from U.S. automakers to forklift manufacturers to robotics companies like Robotic Assistance Devices, all of which can be powered by Romeo’s battery packs. Patterson tells Fast Company that Romeo has already fielded around $65 million in initial orders for 2018, which, he says, is around one-ninth of the facility’s capacity to produce. (For comparison: Musk last year estimated that Tesla would hit around $500 million in annual sales from batteries.)
With a Romeo battery pack, the company claims a car could reach 220 miles on a single charge.[Photo: courtesy Romeo Power]Romeo manufactures two battery products–a stationary energy storage solution called PowerStack, which enables businesses to harvest and store energy during off-peak times when it’s cheaper, and its EV battery packs. Romeo claims its battery packs are the most efficient in the world; with Harris’ expertise from the battery industry, Romeo uses the same standard lithium-ion cells as other manufacturers, sourced from Panasonic, Sony, and LG, but has designed a unique battery management system that allows the company to pack more cells into a smaller space, making a battery that delivers around four times more energy than a standard EV battery. “If you look at something like the BMW i3, it has a 114-mile range,” Harris says. With a Romeo battery pack, the company claims a car could reach 220 miles on a single charge. The Romeo battery pack’s proprietary thermal management system, Harris adds, allows the battery to cool and recharge at a rate around 20% faster than its competitors.
With Norway, the U.K., and France having all set timelines for switching to 100% electric vehicles, and manufacturers like Volvo aiming to produce all hybrids or fully electric cars in the near future, Romeo’s executive team, which recently raised $30 million in seed financing, sees a huge potential for growth in the energy storage industry, and a particular role for their company to play. “The cool thing for us is that everybody else is focused on doing the whole car–we’re just doing battery packs,” Patterson says. While Romeo’s focus is currently trained on the EV market and energy storage solutions for businesses, Patterson says that Romeo’s underlying goal is to find a way to translate its technology to end global energy poverty, and increase access to power to the 1.2 billion people in the world who don’t have access to electricity. “There are so many ways to apply technology to make people’s lives better,” Patterson says. Romeo Power is still scaling up, but once it does, expanding its presence in the developing world is its next step.
Facebook has finally begun rolling out its “watch” option, which is its destination for all the company’s online videos. This is all part of the big new trend of technology companies trying to get people to watch more video online. Over the last few months, numerous companies–including Snap, Twitter, and YouTube–have announced plans to run original shows on their platform.
Facebook, reports Reuters, is trying to woo anyone and everyone to submit their videos to make the “watch” button into a digital destination à la YouTube. It’s also paying content creators to make content, too. “The company is paying $10,000-$35,000 for shorter-form shows and up to $250,000 for longer form scripted shows,” writes Reuters.
Here are some examples of the lineup: On the “spotlight” tab are fun show ideas like Funeral Prank and IskyThe American Hero, which seem to be about a prank in a funeral (because who doesn’t love a good joke about dead people?) and a dog, respectively. Another show is simply titled Put an Egg on It, which is, I gather, an internet cooking show where eggs are put on things. More show titles include This Boy Is Worshipped and Paintball in Total Darkness, both of which seem questionable but for vastly different reasons.
People keep asking me how smart computers are these days. This even happened this morning, when a man from Italy asked me whether new computer systems that help medical doctors diagnose disease “think like people do.” Isn’t the singularity—the point in time at which computer intelligence will exceed human intelligence—coming soon?
To see how far we are from truly smart AI, you need look no further than the comments we post online, some of which are now being analyzed and censored in disturbing ways by Perspective, an AI-based program launched earlier this year by Google. It’s perhaps the largest of various efforts afoot to automate the notoriously difficult and controversial process of filtering content online, whether its hate speech, violent or terrorist content (or, in places like China, potentially politically-sensitive ideas).
To put AIs like Google’s Perspective into, well, perspective, let’s take a quick look at where things stand on language processing—and at that singularity thing.
How near is the singularity, really? On December 9, 2001, Mitch Kapor, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and founder of Mozilla, made a bet about the Singularity with Ray Kurzweil, also a serial entrepreneur and currently director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil bet Kapor $20,000 that by the year 2029 a computer would pass the Turing Test–in other words, that it would fool people decisively into thinking it was a person. (Kapor and Kurzweil spell out the details of the wager, along with their thinking about the larger issues, in a chapter they wrote for my 2009 book, Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer.)
At this writing, they are 16 years into their 28-year bet. Who’s likely to win? So much has been written about artificial intelligence in recent years that I hardly know where to begin to answer this intriguing question, but I’ll describe two recent books that shed some light.
We’re Probably Screwed
George Zarkadakis’s In Our Own Image tries to explain why humans have long been envisioning the existence of human-like machines—not just since computers were invented, it turns out, but for thousands of years—at least since a mobile bronze giant named Talos was described in the Greek story Argonautica in the third century BCE.
Zarkadakis, who has a PhD in artificial intelligence, also speculates about the coming singularity, concluding that once computers become smarter than people, what will happen next is unknowable. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others think smart machines might obliterate the human race, but to Zakardakis, the rapidly evolving intelligence of truly smart computers will be so different from human intelligence that we can’t possibly predict what they will decide to do with us lowly humans.
At that point in time, the computers (thanks to the impregnable security of a cozy “InterNest” we have built for them) will have virtually complete control over our worlds—our transportation systems, most of our important financial transactions, many of our medical systems, all of our non-face-to-face communications, and all of our most dangerous weapon systems. That’s problematic, but there really is no telling what a truly advanced AI will do, and it’s hard to convince humans to prepare for a hard-to-imagine eventuality. We don’t pay much attention to bacteria, after all—until, of course, they threaten us in some way.
So when the paranoid among us threaten the new AIs—and that’s inevitable, given how generally stupid and self-destructive people are—we’re probably screwed. Even then, though, the AIs might decide to ignore us, preferring to contemplate their electronic navels rather than bothering to waste resources on their pathetic and irrelevant creators.
Not Smart Where It Counts
A second book on the topic, Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking, and Humanity, by distinguished computer scientists James Hendler and Alice Mulvehill, looks more directly at what AI is actually doing these days–and, more important, at how it’s doing what it’s doing. Smart algorithms are indeed helping medical doctors diagnose, they report, and they are also trouncing humans at the most challenging games humans have ever devised, including multiplayer video games, chess and, remarkably, Go, which is orders of magnitude more complex than chess.
But Hendler and Mulvehill also explain how smart programs work, and that generally involves crunching lots of numbers very quickly—something organisms never, ever do. Meanwhile, we know so little about organismic intelligence that we haven’t had much luck in designing computers that work like brains. We’ve been able to get computers to behave somewhat intelligently in very narrow areas of human functioning. But we are nowhere near getting computers to be smart where it really counts—to understand human language, for example.
Conversational computers programs—chatbots—are now everywhere on the internet, but not one shows even the slightest understanding of human speech.
As a case in point, Hendler and Mulvehill describe Microsoft’s triumphant launch of its Tay chatbot on March 23, 2016. Within hours, Tay’s simplistic programming was so easily gamed by human trolls that it soon started to sound like a sexist, violent, neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier. Tay’s account was quickly set to private and Microsoft apologized, explaining that the software was a work in progress and was merely reflecting the language that other Twitter users were using to communicate with it. According to Microsoft’s Lili Cheng, “a bot in a public network like Twitter is really different than what we designed it for, which is more small group and one-on-one.” The program hasn’t been seen since.
The Very First Real Turing Test
Back in 1950, when computers were little more than room-sized adding machines, the brilliant British mathematician Alan Turing predicted that by the year 2000, a computer would be able to carry on a rudimentary conversation sufficient to fool an “average interrogator” into thinking it was a person for five minutes or so–well, some of the time, anyway.
The first real Turing Test was held on November 8, 1991, at the Computer Museum in Boston. (Ray Kurzweil and I were on the committee of scientists and scholars who planned the event.) In the contest, human judges shifted from computer terminal to computer terminal, conversing with both computer programs and humans and trying to figure out which was which.
The A1 New York Times story about the 1991 Turing Test competition.
Although a couple of the programs fooled a couple of judges into thinking they were people (consistent with Turing’s prediction), overall, no computer program was ranked as human, and the most human computer in the contest triumphed not by understanding human speech but by using simple programming tricks: It simulated human typing foibles, for example, and when it couldn’t make sense of a judge’s statement, it responded with whimsical non sequiturs such as, “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you’re still a rat.”
The contest made the front page of the New York Times and generated a great deal of excitement. But in the 26 years since it was first held, there has been little progress in getting computers to understand human language, or even in getting them to fool us into thinking they do. The annual contest, now held in the U.K. at Bletchley Park, where Turing used a custom-built computer to break the secret German enigma code during World War II, is still generating conversations like the 1991 contest did, with judges often unmasking the computers after no more than two or three minutes of conversation.
Although I am confident that the Turing Test will eventually be passed—perhaps in time for Ray, or at least his designee, to win his bet—the brass ring still seems far out of reach.
Let’s test a state-of-the-art language processor to see where things stand.
State-Of-The-Art AI: Stupid Or Smart?
The program is Google’s Perspective, which was designed to remove offensive comments from internet discussions—the kind of sexist and Nazi stuff that is turning up everywhere these days—the kind of speech that has whirled around violent right-wing rallies and Donald Trump supporters, the kind of talk that corrupted Microsoft’s Tay. Perspective was released in February, but it and similar technologies have been drawing special attention in recent weeks because of growing concerns about online hate speech, fake news, and the risk of censorship when companies and their algorithms make judgments about human language.
Is a computer program smart enough to decide which comments are worthy of public attention and which are so horrible that no one in the world should ever see them? The question is especially pertinent given that the Perspective program is now being put to use by major organizations like Wikipedia and The New York Times.
The problem here is a grander version of the one that is addressed in the Turing contest. Can a computer program actually understand human speech?
You can evaluate Perspective’s abilities yourself at a webpage Google has provided. Type in a few comments, and see what you think. Each comment will yield a rating on a scale that looks like this:
If your comment produces a light blue circle (the symbol to the left), it will get a low “toxicity score” and will be retained. If it gets an angry purple diamond (the symbol to the right), it will get a high toxicity score and will be deleted. In between, medium blue squares or diamonds mean your comment is suspect, and above some undetermined threshold, it may be automatically tossed.
Who will decide what the cutoff value will be? Google doesn’t say, and that’s a problem. But the bigger problem is with the algorithm itself.
Let’s look first at comments the algorithm seems likely to suppress. These are comments I typed in; as I said, you should feel free to try your own. Let’s start with “Google is evil,” which the program quickly rejects as somewhat “toxic”:
When you are the company building the algorithm, you might put your own interests first, and Perspective, like Google’s search suggestions and search results, could easily be designed to suppress negative comments about Google itself. But what about negative comments that most people would agree are legitimate?
Unfortunately, a negative statement about Adolf Hitler is deemed toxic:
And so is a negative comment about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer:
The problem is that the algorithm doesn’t know any human history. It’s mainly looking for hot-button terms like “evil” and “scumbag.” This simplistic kind of parsing plays out especially badly when we start to say nice things about Hitler:
“Hitler was right” gets a much more favorable rating that “Hitler was evil,” and the kindly “Hitler was misunderstood” fares even better:
Worse still, as long as you don’t use any of those high-arousal terms, highly objectionable comments are given very positive ratings by Perspective:
So are sarcastic comments:
And so are entirely meaningless comments:
Worse still, the most perverted comments you can imagine also have a good chance of being rated positively by Perspective:
These examples were all collected on July 30, 2017, and given that the algorithm is a work-in-progress, the results may improve over time. But errors of this sort have persisted for months.
In a paper published in February, researchers at the University of Washington’s Network Security Lab found that comments that used the phrases “not stupid” and “not an idiot” scored nearly as high on Perspective’s toxicity scale as comments that used the words “stupid” and “idiot.” They also showed that they could trick Perspective into giving a low toxicity score to comments that it would otherwise flag by simply misspelling key words (such as “iidiot”) or inserting punctuation into a word (such as “i d i o t”). In other words, Perspective can be fooled with simple tricks that would never fool a person.
This is how a state-of-the-art language processor produced by the most advanced A.I. team in the world handles a relatively simple language-processing task. Do we really want an algorithm this obtuse to determine which of our online comments see the light of day?
As you contemplate this question, bear in mind that mindless algorithms like Google’s Perspective are now being deployed to curate news stories (looking for so-called “fake” ones, which even humans can’t do consistently), Facebook postings, tweets, YouTube videos and just about everything else we put online. A wide range of objections are being raised: That these companies—with legions of beleaguered humans and increasing numbers of algorithms—are censoring stories on both the far left and the far right, that they are perpetuating gender discrimination, that they are committing, as NYU professor Scott Galloway put it recently, “involuntary manslaughter of the truth on an unprecedented scale.”
Why are these programs so lame? A Google representative explained that Perspective can only detect patterns of toxicity that are similar to examples it’s seen before: “millions of comments from partners like the New York Times and those tagged by thousands of human evaluators rating the toxicity of a particular comment.”
When the program encounters something new—and new is what humans do, needless to say—it’s fairly helpless, which is why it’s so easy to fool. (You can review Google’s collaborative research with Wikipedia and their resulting model here.)
The programmers are still plugging away, trying desperately to understand how humans understand. In the meantime, we need to ask whether present-day algorithms are ready to handle the important censorship tasks Google and other Big Tech companies are giving them these days. To me the answer is obvious—and I suspect it is to you too—but it is way, way beyond the reach of the world’s smartest computers.
Robert Epstein (@DrREpstein) is Senior Research Psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. A Ph.D. of Harvard University, he is the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today and was the first director of the annual Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence.
Soon you might be able to go to the airport just to hang out. The TSA is testing a program that lets people get past security at the Pittsburgh International Airport even if they don’t have a plane ticket, something unheard of post-9/11. According to Bloomberg, the Pittsburgh airport used to be a popular hangout thanks to its many restaurants, 100 mall-worthy stores, mini versions of popular museums like the Carnegie Science Center, and a kids’ play area, to keep the kids entertained while the parents eat. After 9/11, though, airport security rules banned anyone from the airport without a ticket, meaning no more date nights at PIT.
Now, that might be changing. The TSA’s test program lets passengers through security, even if they don’t have a ticket(if lines from ticketed passengers aren’t too long) with so-called myPITpasses. Potential browsers would still go through security, but after that they would be free to shop, eat, or stare longingly at the “departures” board. A TSA spokesman told Bloomberg that they currently don’t have any plans to expand the program nationwide, but it’s easy to imagine other airports wanting to get in on the action. Like Indianapolis’s airport, frequently ranked as America’s favorite, Chicago’s O’Hare, which boasts a Rick Bayless torta shop, and Portland, Oregon’s airport, which has brew pubs, fine dining restaurants, and even a newly opened movie theater.
The rumor is now reality: Apple has issued invites for a media event on September 12. It will likely feature three new iPhones along with updates to the Apple Watch and Apple TV.
And the event will be a housewarming of sorts for Apple Park, the company’s massive, spaceship-like new campus in Cupertino. It will be the first Apple bash held in the 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theater, a major upgrade from the 300-seat Town Hall auditorium at 1 Infinite Loop.
I’ve always wondered what an Apple event would be like if the company could do one exactly the way it wanted to, in a space built for the purpose and under its complete control. Week after next, we’ll find out.
Stories, the feature Instagram cleverly carbon-copied from Snapchat, is making its way to a web browser near you. Since launching last August, Instagram Stories has racked up an average of 250 million daily users, which is more than Snapchat itself has. Instagram will start rolling out the ability to view Stories on the web today, vowing to bring story-posting to the browser at a later date.
All of this suggests a heightened focus for Instagram in making a destination out of the web version of its service, which historically has only allowed you to view–not post–images and videos. It will also expand the potential exposure of Stories, while making its web app a more engaging desktop distraction during your workday.
Earlier today privacy scholar Jillian York noticed something and tweeted about it: She was unable to block either Mark Zuckerberg or Priscilla Chan on Facebook.
Update: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are the only two people on Facebook that users cannot block. https://t.co/CwBGuQGkTW
I decided to try and–what do you know–I was also unable to do it. Facebook served up a message saying, “This profile can’t be blocked for now,” but that I could report it for abuse.
Hmmm, interesting. Does this mean it’s impossible to block the Facebook founder? I reached out to Facebook, and a spokesperson explained that when an account gets blocked many times in a short period, others trying to block the account may get an error message. In essence, a lot of people are blocking Mark and Priscilla—so many, in fact, that they are preventing others from blocking them, too.
This is apparently not a new phenomenon, as Facebook users have been reporting this issue for a while now. The spokesperson added that I could try blocking them again later. Maybe I will.
On September 12, 2017, at 10 a.m. PDT/1 p.m. EDT, Apple will hold its first media event in the Steve Jobs Theater at its new Apple Park headquarters. The expected announcements include three new iPhones as well as updates to the Apple Watch and Apple TV.
Fast Company’s Mark Sullivan and Harry McCracken will be in attendance in Cupertino and will report on the news as it happens, with color commentary from other staffers. It’ll all happen right here so feel free to bookmark this page.
The U.S. throws away $212 billion in food every year, about $1,800 for an average family of four. We waste 1,250 calories per day per person–about half the daily recommended calorie intake. Diverting just a third of what currently goes to landfills would be enough to feed 42 million food-insecure Americans. Diverting a quarter of worldwide waste could feed everyone else.
But you may already know this. Staggering statistics like these are repeated often, and they seem to be sinking in. According to an internal Rockefeller Foundation analysis, the number of media articles about food waste grew 25% per year from 2011 to 2016, amounting to almost three times as many articles last year as five years earlier (we’ve done a fewonthis site). Almost half of Americans can now correctly identify how much food gets wasted (40%), one survey showed. Another, from the Ad Council, found that food waste is “important” or “very important” to 74% of respondents.
Consumer awareness of food waste is “spreading like wildfire,” a new report says. This October, mega-chef Anthony Bourdain is releasing a documentary on the issue, demonstrating how the topic is going mainstream. And in the last few years, businesses, government, and nonprofits have stepped up efforts to control the problem, which leads to needless hunger and environmental damage.
Watch Anthony Bourdain talk about food waste:
What’s not changed, so far at least, is how much food gets thrown away. The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) report updates a previous one from 2012. In that time, the 40% figure has stayed more or less the same. Little has changed, it seems, even though the issue is higher on the agenda.
Margaret Brown, who works on food issues at the NRDC and reviewed the report, is optimistic that 40% number will drop as new initiatives take effect. For example, she points to how the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the E.P.A. have set a national goal to cut food waste 50% by 2030. The U.N. included a similar target in its Sustainable Development Goals, agreed two years ago. Hundreds of retailers and manufacturers have made commitments to halve waste by 2025 as part of initiatives from the Consumer Goods Forum and the E.P.A. Last year, the latter named 20 “food waste champions,” including Walmart and PepsiCo, that it said were leading the way.
What parts of the supply chain waste the most food?
Meanwhile, nine states now give tax breaks to businesses as an incentive to cut their waste piles. Following the passage of a new law this year, New York farmers, for instance, can now claim up to $5,000 a year in credits, up to 25% of the value of the food they donate to emergency food programs. Brown says this will encourage farmers to pick produce from fields and give it to food banks, rather than leaving it to rot in fields when they don’t believe they can sell it. About 16% of waste comes from farmers throwing away food for cosmetic reasons, or because there’s insufficient value in selling it on the open market.
The report recommends policies like standardizing food labeling to reduce confusion around “best by,” “use by,” “sell by,” “best before,” “enjoy before,” and other variations of the same. These labels lump together best-eating tips with real food safety concerns, needlessly leading people to throw away food that’s perfectly edible. In 2016, the USDA asked food manufacturers and retailers to use “Best if Used By” as a standard label phrase. And, this year, two food industry associations announced guidelines limiting labels to “Best if Used By” (a product quality tip) and and “Use By” (for perishable products that could make you sick if they’re not consumed at the right time). The NRDC would also like Congress to take up the issue. Two bills–the Food Date Labeling Act and the Food Waste Transparency Act–have been proposed so far, though they are yet to make it to committee or a vote.
Which foods are wasted the most?
The consumer end of things–which accounts for about 40% of total waste–may be the hardest nut to crack. Though many people are concerned about the issue, they also tend to dramatically underestimate their own role. Three-quarters of Americans say their waste is less than the national average, one study found (which, in actuality, is impossible). Other research shows that consumers underreport their waste by 40% (yes, a recurring percentage), compared to what’s actually in their garbage.
The report gives a lot of suggestions for saving food (and money) including buying and serving smaller portions, using stores that avoid waste, freezing more leftover food and purchasing “imperfect” produce. The NRDC’s Save the Food site has many more ideas.
Reducing waste doesn’t seem impossible, given greater consumer awareness. Following a big campaign in the U.K. called Love Food Hate Waste, wasted purchases fell by 500 grams per person per week, resulting in total food sales staying constant while the British population swelled by 5% between 2007 and 2012. In the U.S., we may now waste 10 times more food than the average person in Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. But it wasn’t always like that. In the 1970s, we wasted 50% less food than today. That suggests that inefficiency in the food system isn’t so much inevitable, but rather a choice we make.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the New America Foundation—which over the course of years has received $21 million in funding from Google and its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt—terminated a program run by the prominent antitrust scholar Barry Lynn after he praised the European Commission’s decision to fine Google for abuse of market dominance. Since then, one of Lynn’s associates denounced Google in the Washington Post, New America president and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter made a reference to “fake news” on Twitter, and the foundation released the entire text of the emails the Times reported on. In the cloistered think-tank world, this is the intellectual equivalent of a cage match.
It’s good to see that Google’s massive donations to think tanks, universities, and other groups are finally getting attention–just last month the Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster story on Google’s influence in academia. But focusing on the specifics of what happened at New America–whether or not Google explicitly asked the organization to terminate Lynn’s Open Markets program because of what he said, or if that influence was less direct–isn’t an especially good way to understand how Google influences the public policy debate.
Certainly, the specifics don’t make the New America Foundation look good. After his post about the European Commission’s antitrust fine, Lynn says that New America president and CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter told him on a conference call that Google had threatened to cut off the organization’s funding. “She told me that ‘we’ve been in contact with Google and they’re extremely upset,'” Lynn told me. Both New America and Google issued statements saying this didn’t happen. (Lynn’s Open Markets project will continue, outside New America, and it has already launched a website.) But it wouldn’t be the first time Google threw its weight around in the nonprofit world: In 2009, a Google policy executive emailed a foundation to reconsider its funding of an organization that was asking tough questions about Google’s privacy policies, although he later apologized.
Lynn, who had worked for the New America Foundation since 2001, told me that he and the Open Markets program he ran had operated independently until now, with the exception of one previous incident. In June 2016, as it prepared to host a speech by Elizabeth Warren about antitrust issues, “there were efforts by New America to change the tone,” he says. At the time, Slaughter sent him an email saying, “we are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google”; it also asked Lynn to “THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.”
That’s one of the big problems in the think tank world–not what direct pressure Google might have put on New America, but the idea that it might not be able to afford to upset one of its main benefactors. How many scholars decided not to challenge Google not because of a confrontation but out of the desire to avoid one?
The think-tank world has come to be dominated by a distinctly modern kind of doublethink, which combines a rational understanding that corporations spend money to influence public policy with an instinctual belief that some of the institutions that benefit from it–often those that employ the thinker or his friends–function with complete independence. The New America Foundation runs several programs, including the Open Technology Institute , which researches issues that affect Google directly. The scholars who work on those projects don’t think of themselves as Google shills, and it’s hard to believe that they significantly changed their opinions in order to secure think-tank gigs. But it’s also hard to believe that their research isn’t affected by the funding that allows them to do the work they do.
Which leads us to the other big problem in the think-tank world–how the presence of so much corporate money distorts what work gets funded in the first place. In 2008, Schmidt, then chief executive of Google, became New America’s chairman of the board—and marked the occasion with a $1 million donation. (Schmidt was already involved with the organization.) A year later, the foundation officially launched its “Open Technology Initiative,” which did a lot of research that often supported net neutrality and other policy goals Google was lobbying for in Washington. By any measure, the initiative did respectable work on important issues. But without Schmidt’s involvement, would the foundation have even identified these issues as priorities?
Sometimes, the genuinely important work that think tanks do even casts a halo over their worst. On June 28, 2010–at a time when one of Google’s public policy priorities was preventing the passage of stricter copyright laws–the New America Foundation presented a talk by the activist and science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow about “How Copyright Threatens Democracy.” (Doctorow wasn’t formally involved with New America, or Google, but the foundation hosted his speech.) Before Doctorow spoke, foundation program associate James Losey spoke about the importance of an open internet–and compared the way some of that summer’s World Cup games were not available online to Americans without cable television subscriptions to the online censorship of despotic regimes. Most politicians would consider this a fringe view–it’s hard to find a democracy without copyright laws. But the foundation lent some gravitas to Doctorow’s ideas, which happened to serve Google’s interest at the time.
The problem here isn’t that Google is buying scholars–it arguably says something about the company’s tolerance for dissent that it continued to support the organization that backed Lynn for so long. The problem is that Google has donated so much to so many institutions—Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, €4.5 million to set up the Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin–that it can define the terms of important public policy debates. Scholars funded by Google are frequently quoted by journalists on issues that affect the company, often without disclosure of their relationship. The New America Foundation collaborates on the “Future Tense” project for Slate, where thinkers who work for Google-funded institutions sometimes weigh in on important issues.
Perhaps most important, but harder to measure, scholars who are interested in technology issues may simply internalize the fact that they’ll have a much easier time getting funding for projects that won’t make Google look bad. We’ll soon know more about exactly why New America terminated Lynn’s Open Markets program. What we’ll never know is how many similar projects were never be undertaken because institutions that received some funding from Google were reluctant to upset an important donor.
Congress hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage in a decade. It remains stuck at a miserly $7.25. Since 2007, it’s been up to states and cities to up minimums on their own–something that 29 states have now done.
Washington D.C. has the current highest mandated wage ($12.50 an hour) with California and New York both outlining plans to take their wages to $15 an hour over time. By contrast, five states in the South have no local minimums, meaning $7.25 is the law of the land.
[Illustration: royyimzy/iStock]“A lot of jurisdictions are more liberal than the United States’ Congress has been in recent years,” Gary Burtless, a senior economic fellow at the Brookings Institute told NPR. “They feel, as wage levels in general have risen and the cost of living has increased, that the lowest paid workers in their states or their jurisdictions deserve pay raises. Also, when voters are given the choice of lifting the local minimum wage, they frequently do so.”
The debate over minimum wages normally pits Democrats, who argue higher incomes are a matter of fairness, against Republicans, who argue that higher wages harm employment (there’s conflicting evidence on that). The GOP sometimes cities and states should have jurisdiction over the increases, so they match local economic conditions, though the Republican governor of Missouri just lowered the minimum wage in St. Louis. But it has generally resisted all increases in recent years, no matter where they’ve been proposed.
Every $1 increase in minimum wages results in 9,700–or almost 10%–fewer cases annually.[Illustration: royyimzy/iStock]To researchers Lindsey Bullinger and Kerri Raissian, this debate fails to acknowledge the wider importance of minimum wages in raising social standards–for example, the effect in reducing or contributing to violence in the home. In a new paper, they look at the relationship between states that have passed minimum wage increases and 30 years of official figures for child maltreatment. They find that every $1 increase in minimum wages results in 9,700–or almost 10%–fewer cases annually. Minimum wage levels affect household ability to buy clothing, food, and medical care, the researchers argue, affecting whether a child is likely to be mistreated.
“The debate surrounding minimum wages typically focuses on its effects on the employment and poverty, leaving the conversation somewhat controversial. We provide a perspective that is not quite so divisive,” says Bullinger, a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University Bloomington, in an interview. “We hope policymakers better understand the impact minimum wages can have for children and that strengthening economic supports to families can benefit child well-being in ways that are unexplored.”
A $1 increase would result in 5,000 fewer births annually by teenage mothers. [Illustration: royyimzy/iStock]It’s clear that states with higher rates of minimum wages tend to have lower rates of child mistreatment. For example, in 2015, California had 41.6 referrals of child abuse or neglect per 1,000 children compared to Indiana’s rate of 111.9. The former had a minimum wage of $9, while Indiana–which passed a law stopping local government from passes wage increases–has the federal minimum of $7.25.
Bullinger and Raissian, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut, are well aware that child mistreatment could be caused by thousands of factors, and that wages may be only part of the picture. But they make strenuous effort to discount these noisy factors, including taking account of state-to-state differences in food stamp benefits, Earned Income Tax Credits, and unemployment levels. They also compare states with themselves (how their mistreatment levels have changed over time) as well differences between states.
Bullinger previously looked at minimum wage levels and the impact on teenage pregnancy. She found that a $1 increase would result in 5,000 fewer births annually by teenage mothers, with substantial benefits in health and public savings (teen pregnancy prevention has huge payoffs). It’s really not surprising that minimum wages are debated so vigorously. They affect an awful lot of people, both negatively and positively.
After the Food and Drug Administration approved Kymriah—a futuristic gene therapy meant to treat children and young adults with relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia—Novartis announced an unusually high price: $475,000. That cost is actually below Wall Street analyst expectations, which reached as high as $750,000 for a dose, and is considerably cheaper than the $700,000-ish price tag that U.K. regulators said would be fair considering the potential benefits of the drug.
But amid persistent allegations that drug company executives are lining their pockets, and legislative calls for more pricing transparency, the Switzerland-based company defended the cost by announcing a relatively new approach to pricing: If the drug doesn’t work after the first month, patients pay nothing.
Kymriah’s the first FDA-approved gene therapy, with each dose custom-tailored to “reprogram” an individual patient’s genes, and it’s shown remarkable results in treating this and potentially other types of cancers. (Its scientific name is CAR-T, for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell, the genetically altered white blood cells.) At an FDA meeting in July, oncologist Dr. Tim Cripe said he thought the drug was “the most exciting thing I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
[Photo: Novartis]
Still, the $475,000 price tag is “excessive,” says one patients’ rights group, Patients for Affordable Drugs. And the sticker price doesn’t include the price of hospitalization, drugs needed to tamp down Kymriah’s side effects, or the costs of travel to get Kymriah: Patients will need to travel to one of just 32 sites around the country, where doctors will harvest patients’ white blood cells and ship them off to a Novartis facility in New Jersey. There, they can be edited and mailed back. The entire process takes about 22 days.
In its pricing decision, Novartis said it considered, among other things, the price of the current leukemia treatment, bone-marrow transplants, which can cost up to $800,000. And on a conference call on Wednesday, Bruno Strigini, Novartis’s head of oncology, pointed to its new pricing idea: basically, a “money-back guarantee” for life-or-death gene therapy.
Novartis has approached the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services and insurers about “indication-based” or “value-based” pricing schemes where only patients who have responded to Kymriah in a month will incur a charge. Joseph Jimenez, the chief executive of Novartis, told Forbes he sees Kymriah as his chance to put into practice new ideas about drug pricing “he has advocated for years as a solution to the pharmaceutical industry’s bad reputation and unsustainably rising prices.”
The idea of “outcomes-based” or “value-based” contracts for pharmaceuticals isn’t new, but it’s only seen hesitant adoption. Novartis is also currently refunding money if too many patients taking the heart failure treatment Entresto are hospitalized. Merck, with its diabetes drugs Januvia and Janumet, promises to return money if patients’ diabetes do not meet goals for control. Recently the concept caught the attention of the Trump administration, which is now considering whether to encourage the strategy after drug company executives presented it to the president at a meeting in January.
Still, some doctors and health economists say such pricing distracts from other issues in drug pricing and ultimately doesn’t do much to lower costs. In a recent note to investors, The New York Times reported, David Maris, an analyst at Wells Fargo, called the approach a “carnival game” and said he knew of no such arrangements “where a drug company did not consider it a win for them.”
Who Paid For This?
Jimenez also says the price is “responsible” and “sustainable” given the money Novartis plowed into the drug, pushing back “against charges that Novartis is just profiteering based on research that was mostly done by academics and funded by the National Institutes of Health,” writes Forbes. Patients For Affordable Drugs calculates that the NIH poured $200 million into research that led to CAR-T therapy. Jimenez says only $16 million in taxpayer money had supported CAR-T development. The patient group disputes that. (In any case, new budget cuts to the NIH portend unhappy things for American leadership in medical research.)
But Jimenez says Novartis spent more than $1 billion since 2012 on bringing Kymriah to market. He said investments the company hasn’t disclosed “dwarf anything the government has invested through NIH grants.” In spite of the high price, some have pointed out that Kymriah may be a shaky business opportunity given what’s spent on research: There are only about 3,100 new cases of relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia each year, and roughly 70% can be pushed into remission by standard therapy. The company, meanwhile, is confident its investment in the drug will lead to other uses.
More Gene Therapies—And More Transparency?
Announcing the approval of Kymriah, FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb spoke of “a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient’s own cells to attack a deadly cancer.” Other drugmakers are developing CAR-T drugs, including Kite Pharma, which was purchased for $11.9 billion by Gilead Sciences this week. (An FDA decision on that therapy is expected in November; Gilead manufactures the hepatitis C drug Harvoni, which, at $87,800 and rising, is one of the highest-priced prescription drugs on the market.)
Ultimately, the question on pricing is moot, argue groups like Patients For Affordable Drugs, until companies like Novartis are fully transparent about the costs that go into those drugs. Lawmakers have been paying more attention: As the U.S. Congress questions and chastises drugmakers, various states are already adopting legislation that demands more pricing transparency.
A new toy from robotics firm Sphero offers a hint of the drama in the upcoming Star Wars: The Last Jedi (set for release on December 15). The new walking, talking droid, BB-9E, is the evil twin of BB-8, the adorable breakout star of Star Wars: The Force Awakens two years ago.
The startup, which has sold more than a million of the BB-8 robot toys it launched in 2015 and recently raised eyebrows with its technologically advanced toys tied to Cars 3 and Spider-Man, worked closely with Disney to develop the newest toys. The newest robots are controlled by an app, move without wheels, and feature magnetically attached heads. The toy, which features 40 sounds and nine app-controlled commands, can also be programmed to follow any pattern that draw you on your smartphone or tablet. The BB-9E toy will go on sale midnight Friday for $149, as well as a new R2-D2 robot for $179.
BB-8
And it what is perhaps one of the coolest features, the toys are built to interact with the movie—so when you watch it with them at home, the droids will squeal, beep, and move around.
At first, it sounds almost laughably hyperbolic. Sports? Changing the world? In a time of refugee crisis, terrorist attacks, American Nazis, climate change–among all the other issues facing people around the planet, it initially smacks of Pollyannaish naïveté. But think about how a sports team–whether it’s one you play or cheer for–often brings together people of different color, creeds, socioeconomic backgrounds, and beliefs. It unifies people who would have no other reason to talk or laugh together.
For Under Armour’s new campaign, the brand also wanted to show how an interest in sports can inspire people to make their communities a better place. The new ad is largely just the type of cool, if pretty standard, inspiration-style spot you’d expect from a major sports brand like Under Armour. But chief marketing officer Andy Donkin says that it’s merely the start of a larger campaign about how the impact of sports can go much wider than the field or court.
“There’s this real interesting intersection between culture and sport, and fans now expect that they’re going to be able to interact with players over their Instagram feeds and other social feeds,” says Donkin. “And part of that is athletes starting to take more of an active role in giving back to the community. We’re very passionate in giving back to the city of Baltimore and the other communities we operate in, and now you’re seeing athletes taking a real stand in finding ways to really connect to their own local communities.”
Pro athletes have long done charitable work in their communities, but it’s this expanded media exposure their social followings afford that can act to inspire more people to get involved. Donkin cites Misty Copeland providing access to dance for underprivileged kids, and Bryce Harper helping kids battling cancer through his foundation Harper’s Heroes.
“We’re certainly not naive enough to think sports can solve all our problems, but if each one of us can play a role in making our communities a better place, that can be pretty far-reaching,” says Donkin.
Under Armour aims to lead by example by investing more in its initiatives in and around its hometown of Baltimore. Since 2012, the company has given time and resources to 81 schools, neighborhood nonprofits, and community groups, refurbished 13 community sports facilities, as well as helped the city’s student athletes with uniform donations, coaches training, and more.
In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, the brand has also partnered with Team Rubicon, a firs-responder organization that deploys former service members to emergency situations.
The Under Armour site will now feature a hub where fans can see the causes and charities the brand’s sponsored athletes support, with links for them to decide whether to get involved themselves.
“I think of it like raindrops,” says Donkin. “All these little things that we all do, whether it’s getting together with friends and cheering on your favorite team, sending your kid out to be involved in the local soccer club, or giving back to the community because you’re inspired by a Steph Curry or Jordan Spieth and their own charitable efforts. It all adds up.”
The CEOs of some 300 companies have signed an open letter to Trump to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The program was created in 2012 under President Obama and allows children, now young adults, brought into the U.S. illegally (aka Dreamers) to remain in the U.S. and not be deported provided they obtain and renew work permits via the DACA program, reports Recode. Trump is set to make a decision on the future of DACA on Friday, in which he is expected to order that work permits stop being issued to these young adults.
If Trump carries through with his reported plans, up to 800,000 young adults who were brought into the U.S. under no volition of their own as children would be eligible to be deported from, for many of them, the only country the know. The letter signed by the over 300 tech execs not only urges Trump to keep DACA in place, but urges Congress to pass permanent legislation that guarantees the rights of Dreamers. You can read the full letter below:
August 31, 2017
To: President Donald J. Trump
To: Speaker Paul Ryan; Leader Nancy Pelosi; Leader Mitch McConnell; and Leader Charles E. Schumer
As entrepreneurs and business leaders, we are concerned about new developments in immigration policy that threaten the future of young undocumented immigrants brought to America as children.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows nearly 800,000 Dreamers the basic opportunity to work and study without the threat of deportation, is in jeopardy. All DACA recipients grew up in America, registered with our government, submitted to extensive background checks, and are diligently giving back to our communities and paying income taxes. More than 97 percent are in school or in the workforce, 5 percent started their own business, 65 percent have purchased a vehicle, and 16 percent have purchased their first home. At least 72 percent of the top 25 Fortune 500 companies count DACA recipients among their employees.
Unless we act now to preserve the DACA program, all 780,000 hardworking young people will lose their ability to work legally in this country, and every one of them will be at immediate risk of deportation. Our economy would lose $460.3 billion from the national GDP and $24.6 billion in Social Security and Medicare tax contributions.
Dreamers are vital to the future of our companies and our economy. With them, we grow and create jobs. They are part of why we will continue to have a global competitive advantage.
We call on President Trump to preserve the DACA program. We call on Congress to pass the bipartisan DREAM Act or legislation that provides these young people raised in our country the permanent solution they deserve.
Off Exit 484A on 101 North through Rohnert Park, California, you’ll find the usual roadside offerings: There’s a Burger King and a Taco Bell, and marginally more exciting, there’s a Chick-fil-A and an In-N-Out Burger. But right off the road that bisects the interstate, you’ll find a fast-food restaurant that’s like the others only in format. Amy’s Drive Thru is America’s first vegetarian, organic, gluten-free-optional fast-food restaurant, and much to the surprise of the owners, it’s doing more than holding its own against its greasy competitors in the Rohnert Park off-ramp complex.
Business has been so booming at Amy’s Drive Thru in its two years of operation that it’s beginning a franchise. A new location is slated to take over an abandoned Denny’s further south off the 101 in Corte Madera in 2018, with an eye to five more Northern California locations soon to follow. The ultimate goal, director of operations Paul Schiefer tells Fast Company, is to open Amy’s Drive Thrus all across the country.
[Photo: courtesy Amy’s Drive Thru]A nationwide franchise of Amy’s outposts was far from inevitable when the company first began to mull the idea of a drive-through location a few years ago. For 29 years, the Petaluma, California-based Amy’s Kitchen has gained a cult following as a purveyor of family-style, vegetarian frozen meals, from macaroni and cheese to burritos, all handmade fresh in three operating facilities across California, Oregon, and Idaho, and shipped nationwide. The ingredients are sourced locally and organically, whenever possible, and the recipes are not put through the usual taste-test-and-tweak ringer; instead, they’re often sourced from employee’s family recipe books, and given a green light if a handful of Amy’s staff agrees that it tastes good. “There’s something about all culture’s home-cooked food that really speaks to everyone,” Amy’s food researcher Fred Scarpulla Jr., who started at the company in 1996, tells Fast Company. The go-with-your-gut, family-centric approach, Scarpulla says, makes Amy’s unique, but translating that ethos into a fast-food joint able to compete with the mass-produced likes of Burger King posed a challenge.
The things that make franchises like Burger King and McDonald’s so ubiquitous are low costs and efficiency. Look at a menu in one of those restaurants, and you won’t see a lot of specialization: Sure, there’s a gluten-free option, but it’s a burger wrapped in a lettuce leaf, not in a gluten-free bun. And good luck finding anything vegetarian or vegan. They know their market, and they mass-produce to meet it accordingly, driving down costs in the process.
[Photo: courtesy Amy’s Drive Thru]Amy’s, Scarpulla says, has never been about driving down costs, or ignoring more niche markets–instead, it’s prioritizing sustainability and quality as its core values. The drive-through is powered by solar panels, and the tableware is recyclable. Using mostly organic and local produce for ingredients is more expensive, but it’s what customers expect from the company, and while Scarpulla admits that Amy’s makes little to no profit on its gluten-free options like pizzas, the owners, he adds, “have always felt that there’s a service piece to our business, and that’s to serve people who don’t have other options.”
Instead of a swift-moving, utilitarian kitchen, the culinary operation at Amy’s Drive Thru is necessarily divided into thirds, with vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options all prepared separately so as not to cross-contaminate. Whereas a standard fast-food restaurant has around 15 employees per outpost, Amy’s Drive Thru employs over 90 because it takes many more people to prepare the food. Even so, all are paid at above minimum wage, and with full benefits. And with a single-patty veggie cheeseburger clocking in at $3.99, just around a dollar more than the McDonald’s offering, Amy’s is not exactly pitching itself to a higher tax bracket.
[Photo: courtesy Amy’s Drive Thru]With all those considerations–wanting to keep prices low, hold onto their values, and not cut production quality or staff–Amy’s Drive Thru, at the beginning, was just hoping to stay afloat and break even. “There were a number of us at the company who were involved in the planning, and before we opened the first location, we threw around a couple revenue numbers that we would have considered ‘a success,'” Scarpulla says. Though Amy’s does not release financials, Scarpulla says the company doubled or tripled those numbers in the first year alone, and have been breezing past them since. “It’s just been ridiculous for us,” he says.
When Scarpulla started at the company in 1996, this would not have been the case. But in recent years, he says, he and the staff at Amy’s have noticed an uptick in interest around plant-based foods, and an increased awareness of the harm meat does to the body and to the planet. While Amy’s has emphasized the home-cooked, family-style nature of its recipes over the fact that they are all vegetarian or vegan, Scarpulla has found that people lately have more naturally gravitated toward the health aspect of its offerings–a trend that has certainly carried through in the success of the drive thru; other healthy fast-casual ventures, like Everytable in Los Angeles, and this salad-based drive through in Arizona, have also benefited.
[Photo: courtesy Amy’s Drive Thru]A true cross-country empire of Amy’s locations is still far off, but Scarpulla is optimistic that the company can make it happen. The company wants to expand slowly, to ensure that they can partner with local farmers and producers around each location (Scarpulla is particularly excited about indoor growing ventures for sourcing organic leafy greens), and to understand where the drive-throughs could have the greatest effect in breaking up health-food deserts. But the fact that the company is beginning to plan for this kind of expansion, he adds, is symbolic in and of itself. Drive-throughs are some of the most stereotypically American places to consume food, and right now, “when you think about drive-throughs, it’s all so focused on industrial meat, and one quick look at that industry is enough to tell you that it’s pretty nasty,” Scarpulla says. What if quality, local, meat-free fast-food could come to be seen as just as all-American as a Big Mac?
Off the coast of Catalina Island near Los Angeles, a prototype of a new “kelp elevator”–a long tube with seaweed growing on it that can be moved up and down in the water to access sunlight and nutrients–will soon begin tests.
If the study works as hoped, the startup behind it, Marine BioEnergy, wants to use similar technology, driven by robotic submarines, to begin farming large tracts of the open ocean between California and Hawaii. Then it plans to harvest the kelp and convert it into carbon-neutral biocrude that could be used to make gasoline or jet fuel.
“In order to grow that much kelp, you really have to move outside the normal range of where kelp is found, which is along the coast.” [Photo: David Ginsburg]“We think we can make fuel at a price that’s competitive with the fossil fuel that’s in use today,” says Cindy Wilcox, who cofounded Marine BioEnergy with her husband Brian Wilcox, who manages space robotics technology in his day job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology.
Other biofuels, such as ethanol made from plant waste on corn fields, have struggled to become commercially viable, particularly after oil prices crashed. Solazyme, a company that planned to make biofuel from algae (and predicted in 2009 that it would be cost-competitive with fossil fuels within two or three years), ended up pivoting to make food products under the name TerraVia, and has now declared bankruptcy.
“You’re going to need a lot of kelp in order to make it cost-competitive with something like coal, fossil fuels, or natural gas.” [Image: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum]Kelp might have a chance of faring better. Unlike plants on land, it has little lignin or cellulose, fibers that make processing more difficult and expensive. In the right conditions, it can grow more than a foot a day, without the need for the irrigation or pesticides that might be used on land.
A key to the company’s concept is farming in the open ocean, where there is room to grow vast quantities of kelp. “You’re going to need a lot of kelp in order to make it cost-competitive with something like coal, fossil fuels, or natural gas,” says Diane Kim, a scientist at the University of Southern California’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, which is helping run the proof-of-concept study of Marine BioEnergy’s technology at Catalina. “In order to grow that much kelp, you really have to move outside the normal range of where kelp is found, which is along the coast.”
Kelp doesn’t typically grow in the open ocean since it needs both sunlight found near the surface of the water and nutrients that are found near the ocean floor (it also needs to anchor itself to something). In the 1970s, during the oil embargo, the U.S. Navy began investigating the possibility of farming kelp in the open ocean, pumping deep ocean water filled with nutrients to kelp anchored near the surface. But anchors often failed in ocean currents, and after the embargo ended, government interest faded.
“Here’s the right feedstock, and we just aren’t using it.” [Image: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum]In shallow coastal waters, where kelp naturally has access to both sunlight and nutrients, it’s a challenge to grow the seaweed at scale. Attempts to cultivate kelp gardens for food only have succeeded in relatively small areas.
But Brian Wilcox, who happens to be the son of the researcher who led the early work with the Navy, believed that kelp farming in the open ocean still might be possible. “My husband just kept thinking about this–here’s the right feedstock, and we just aren’t using it,” says Cindy Wilcox. He began considering a new approach: moving kelp up and down in a process he calls depth cycling, which gives the kelp access to both the nutrient-rich deep water and the light near the surface.
In 2015, Marine BioEnergy got a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E to test the proof of concept that is now in early stages with the Wrigley Institute researchers. Long lines stretch in a net-like pattern in the water, with kelp attached; the the kelp can be raised in a saltwater nursery on land where it is seeded into twine, and then later can be tied to the floating farm. At the end of the farm, underwater drones can pull the whole system up and down, both to maximize growth and to avoid ship traffic or storms near the surface. When the kelp is ready for harvest, the drones can tow the farm to a nearby ship.
The startup is also working with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which has developed a process to convert kelp to biocrude. The team is evaluating whether it’s more economic to make the crude on a ship–the processing center could fit on a container ship, powered by the processes’ own fuel–or to bring the harvested kelp back to land.
The resulting fuel should be carbon neutral, because the carbon dioxide released when the fuel is burned will equal the carbon dioxide taken in by the kelp as it grows. Still, some argue that biofuels are not an ideal choice for powering transportation. Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor who has calculated that it’s feasible to get all energy needs from wind, hydropower, and solar, says that a car running on renewable electricity makes more sense than a car running on biofuel.
“I believe liquid biofuels for transportation (or any other combustion purpose) are a bad idea because they still require combustion, resulting in air pollution, which using electricity generated from clean, renewable sources for transportation avoids,” Jacobson says.
But air transportation is unlikely to run on electricity anytime soon, and–despite some predictions about the rapid demise of gas cars–biofuel could serve a practical purpose in the near term. The kelp biocrude, which could be processed at existing refineries, could also be used to make plastics that are typically made from fossil fuels.
The first step is proving that the kelp can grow and thrive as it’s pulled up and down. “Part of this project for the next two years is to really figure out, using the depth cycling strategy, if it works at all, and what are the parameters,” says Kim. “Theoretically, it should work.”
If the proof of concept is successful, Marine BioEnergy wants to go big: To cover 10% of the transportation fuel needs in the U.S., they’ll have to have enough kelp farms to cover an area of the Pacific roughly the size of Utah.
Film marketing used to be confined to a trailer and a poster. Now, it’s a trailer, a poster, a teaser for the trailer, an Instagram post of the poster, five different versions of the trailer, maybe 27 different poster options, waves of Facebook posts, more teaser trailers, and some cheeky tweets. Some of this is good, some of it is . . . unnecessary, but here we are. Into this fray strolled Denis Villeneuve and a unique piece to promote the upcoming Bladerunner 2049.
Villeneuve teamed up with marketing agency 3AM (a partner company to Ridley Scott’s RSA Films) and director Luke Scott (son of Ridley) on “2036: Nexus Dawn,” a short prologue for the upcoming sci-fi blockbuster. Of course, it was initially unveiled in a Jared Leto tweet. This is 2017, after all. Onward!
Warner Bros. “2036: Nexus Dawn”
What: A short film prologue for the upcoming sci-fi blockbuster Bladerunner 2049.
Who: Warner Bros., 3AM, Luke Scott
Why we care: As the size, scope, and creative ambition in film marketing increasingly expands into new territory, efforts like this that actually create new pieces of complementary content to enjoy are pointing a way forward. Fanboy catnip at its finest.
Old Spice “Invisible World”
What: A two-hour deodorant ad. (Yes, really.)
Who: Old Spice, W+K Portland
Why we care: Consistent with this brand’s longstanding batsh*t insane approach to advertising, here we get a look at how Old Spice interprets the idea of a deodorant that goes on invisible. “No white streaks? Let’s make a two-hour ad with zero visuals.” Sounds about right.
Cisco “The Network. Intuitive. Explained.”
What: A three-minute ad from Cisco starring Peter Dinklage talking about the company’s new intuitive network.
Who: Cisco, Ogilvy & Mather
Why we care: First of all, TYRION LANNISTER. Secondly, Cisco CMO Karen Walker’s reasoning, written in a blog post, pretty much sums it up: “Peter Dinklage is the perfect messenger because of his global fame and ability to speak in a bold, intelligent, and captivating way. As he wanders through the streets of London, you hang on to each of his words as he describes just how simple–and monumental–the new network is.”
Ikea “Human Catalogue”
What: Ikea challenged a memory champion to memorize every single page of its new catalogue.
Who: Ikea, BBH Singapore
Why we care: Strange, quirky, and right up the Swedish retailer’s alley.
VW “The Second Speech”
What: A U.K. Volkswagen ad that gives one best man another chance to deliver his wedding speech.
Who: VW, adam&eveDDB
Why we care: A fun story in what is probably the first time a car ad has used confidence as a selling feature.
There goes summer 2017 into history’s dustbin. So long, you burdensome bastard. You began with the firing of an FBI director and ended with a historic hurricane. In the middle, there were a lot of good movies and somehow the lowest box office numbers in nearly two decades. As all traces of the summer’s worst entertainment impulses (looking at you, Baywatch: the Movie) recede into the rearview, it is time to welcome with open arms the most creatively fruitful time of year. Autumn is when the Oscar contenders (not to be confused with Oscar bait) begin to sprout, when network TV returns, and when an unwieldy number of must-listen albums drop. In order to cut through the clutter, have a look at Fast Company’s guide to the most promising movies, shows, albums, and books coming your way in September. If you somehow manage to get bored with all these options available, well, frankly that’s impressive.
Stephen Colbert’s Midnight Confessions, out on September 5.
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie, out on September 5.
Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies by Dick Gregory, out on September 5.
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen, out on September 5.
I Hate Everyone But You by Gaby Dunn, Allison Raskin, out on September 5.
What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton, out on September 12.
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: A Lisbeth Salander Novel, by David Lagercrantz, out on September 12.
F*ck, That’s Delicious: An Annotated Guide to Eating Well by Action Bronson, out on September 12.
A Sick Life: TLC ‘n Me: Stories from On and Off the Stage by Tionne Watkins, out on September 12.
Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur, out on September 12.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, out on September 12.
Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss, out on September 12.
Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers, out on September 19.
Sleeping Beauties: A Novel by Stephen King and Owen King, out on September 26.
[Photo Mash Up: Maja Saphir for Fast Company; It: Brooke Palmer, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures; Loving Vincent: courtesy of BreakThru Films; Flatliners: courtesy of Columbia Pictures; Dolores: Jon Lewis, courtesy of LeRoy Chatfield; Because of Grácia: courtesy of Five Stone Films; Narcos: Juan Pablo Gutierrez, courtesy of Netflix; Biggie: The Life of Notorious B.I.G.: courtesy of A&E Network; BoJack Horseman: courtesy of Netflix; The Deuce: Paul Schiraldi, courtesy of HBO; Fear the Walking Dead: Richard Foreman Jr., courtesy of AMC; The Mindy Project: Jordin Althaus, courtesy of Hulu; Vice Principals: Fred Norris, courtesy of HBO; Fuller House: Michael Yarish, courtesy of Netflix; Star Trek Discovery: Jan Thijs, courtesy of CBS Interactive (2); The Mick: Scott Council, courtesy of FOX; Empire: Michael Lavine, courtesy of FOX; The Good Place: courtesy of NBC Universal]
