A Silicon Valley think tank will bring a ten-week startup accelerator program to Downtown Columbus in the fall, the latest in what has been a steady stream of announcements in recent months from the Smart Columbus team.
Singularity University announced the program today, to be called the Smart City Accelerator. It will be open to both local and national businesses, ranging from two-person startups to established corporations (who would be able to send a small team).
Only ten businesses will be selected to take part in the program, which will run from September 12th to November 17th. The selected applicants will be eligible to receive up to $100,000 in funding from Columbus-based venture capital firm NCT Ventures.
“The SU Smart City Accelerator will attract innovators from around the world and amplify the successes Columbus already has achieved in becoming recognized as a global center of technology and innovation,” said Mayor Andrew Ginther in a press release.
“We are committed to giving the innovators and entrepreneurs who participate in this world-class accelerator program full access to our community as a living laboratory so that we can learn together what business models and technologies are going to make our cities better in the future for all people,” added Alex Fischer, President and CEO of the Columbus Partnership.
The program will be housed at 107 S. High St., with the selected businesses receiving access to co-working space in the building.
The website for potential applicants lists five broad areas of focus for businesses looking to participate:
Mobility (including logistics and automated vehicles)
Connectivity (including wireless and satellite technologies)
Data/Analytics (including artificial intelligence and machine learning)
Infrastructure/Energy (including battery technology, charging stations, and “alternative propulsion systems”)
Manufacturing/Production (including 3D printing and micro-manufacturing)
“When Columbus won the U.S. Department of Transportation Smart City Challenge, Singularity University wanted to be part of – and contribute to – the innovation ecosystem here,” said Nick Davis, Singularity University Vice President of Corporate Innovation.
The accelerator marks Singularity’s first long-term program outside of its home base in California.
The initial Smart City grant application had a relatively narrow focus – new technology would be used to improve access to transportation and to provide specific benefits for neighborhoods like Linden. Although those ideas are still being pursued, as more partners are brought in and more initiatives get placed under the Smart Columbus umbrella, the scope of the program has grown.
“This accelerator will empower entrepreneurs to leverage breakthroughs in technology, from autonomous vehicles to efficiencies made possible by object awareness, to enhance lives and improve standards of living,” said Rich Langdale, Managing Partner of NCT Ventures. “The Smart Cities initiative is more than a challenge. Civilization is at a turning point and Columbus has the opportunity to promote innovation and pioneer what it means to live in a smart city of the future.”
Brent Warren is a staff contributor to Columbus Underground who writes about urban development, transportation, city planning, neighborhoods, civics and other related topics.
A 48-year-old man named James Jones reportedly walked into Zona Caliente Sports Bar in Arlington, Texas, and began yelling. When restaurant manager Cesar Perez attempted to calm him down, he was murdered for his trouble.
Fortunately, there was another armed man in the restaurant at the time. The man, who asked to remain anonymous, was eating at a table with his wife when he saw the above crime occur. Instructing his wife to get down, he stood and shot the killer in the back.
The bad guy then began to fire — but not at anyone in particular.
“I don’t think the [bad guy] even knew where the rounds were coming from because he started shooting at the front door.” — Arlington Police Lieutenant Chris Cook
The murderer was equipped to wreak a lot of havoc, which may have been what he had in mind… aside from the gun he used to kill Perez, he had a second handgun and “two knives.”
Police were supportive of the good Samaritan’s actions:
“We’re thankful that the good ‘Samaritan’ acted quickly and decisively to end the threat,” Cook said. “We never recommend people get involved. That’s a personal decision that a citizen has to make.”
The man who defended the innocent did not want his identity to become public:
The man who took down Jones wished to maintain his anonymity, police said, noting that he felt overwhelmed but relieved that he prevented further violence.
Please join me in applauding this gun-toting man’s fast, decisive action which very likely prevented the death or injury of numerous others in that restaurant.
A 3D Lidar point cloud of a road intersection. The data that these scanners produce should be relatively straightforward to use in a sim.
HERE
A beautiful 2nd gear corner. How much more fun would it be if we didn’t have to worry about pissing off the people who live there?
Jonathan Gitlin
Climb South Grade, then descend on East Grade, then complete the loop on SR-76, and get ready for another 26.7 mile lap.
Google
Sure, you can take the freeway to work, but this route took about as long, had very little traffic, and a lot of corners. When I realized my commute was the high point of my day, I realized that perhaps I needed to do something other than scientific research as a career.
Google
For quite a lot of people, driving is a chore, something they have to do to get to work or the grocery store. And for those drivers, a car is just a tool. But for others, driving is something to be enjoyed. However, it’s getting hard to be a responsible driving enthusiast. There are a number of factors at play here. For one thing, it is becoming more and more socially unacceptable to speed on roads. Cities nationwide are implementing 25mph speed limits, and the evidence coming in shows that does in fact have a measurable effect on pedestrian casualties. But even out of town, the open roads aren’t so empty anymore.
That makes it frustrating for other drivers—who don’t want to contend with Ricky Racer and his Miata pinned to their bumper for miles and miles—and frustrating Ricky, who just wants to have some fun. So the prospect of an Sunday-morning drive through the country starts to become less and less appealing.
My favorite roads
At the same time, most of have a road or two that lives in our memory. For me, it’s my old Californian drive to work through Rancho Santa Fe and the epic backroads that shadowed the 5 as one headed towards La Jolla from North County. Even better was the “Californiaring,” a triangular route of 26.7 miles (44.4km) that took you up Mt Palomar’s 270-degree, hairpin-filled south face then down the faster, flowing east side before taking SR-76 back to start it all over again.
Back in the old days—probably before they even built South Grade—I reckon you could have persuaded the powers that be to let you close the roads for a Californian equivalent of the Targa Florio. A couple of hours from LA, you’d be guaranteed a young hotshot actor or three on the grid, and it could have the makings of a tradition.
In the 21st century though, it seems implausible that you would be allowed to close 28 miles of public highway for a week to run a race where—lets be honest—the chances are someone could get really quite hurt are a possibility.
But I’m wondering if there’s a solution on the way thanks to a combination of autonomous vehicles and racing sims. Now I know what you’re thinking: autonomous vehicles are anathema to the driving enthusiast, taking over the driving completely and leaving the passengers to stare out the window as the scenery goes past. And for those people for whom driving is a chore (or something they can’t do, like the blind or infirm), that’s good.
Racing sims to the rescue?
But here’s the thing. Once all those lidar-equipped vehicles I keep writing about finally start appearing on our roads, they’re going to be going around, laser-scanning our favorite roads. There’s little doubt that this would work; Ford told us back in 2015 that its fleet of autonomous Ford Fusions had already scanned lots of NASCAR tracks and stadiums, in part to use that data in the simulators for its factory-backed racing program. (By now Ford may well have scanned all the NASCAR tracks and moved onto the IMSA road courses.) That means the Californiaring will soon exist as one or more 3D point clouds—all it needs is someone to drive around slowly, capturing the data.
From there it can’t beyond the wit of humankind to export that data into the mod-able racing platform of one’s choice. After all, laser-scanned tracks are something the entire racing game industry is au fait with now. Obviously it’s not quite as simple as just having a Lidar map. Studios like Turn 10, Codemasters, and Slightly Mad have to put in plenty of elbow grease to fill in all the visual detail and even things like different road surfaces (which will have different amounts of available grip). But for this kind of application I reckon people would put up with fewer graphical bells and whistles for a chance to find out just how fast their favorite route could be, devoid of oncoming traffic, errant pedestrians, and wildlife—not to mention John Q. Law. The technology allows me to drive Pikes Peak or Le Mans from the comfort of home, so this should also be doable.
Thinking even further out to a time when autonomous cars are far more prevalent, I could even see this going one further. Come up with what you thing is the perfect sim run with your wheel or controller? Upload that telemetry/replay to your autonomous car and ride it as a passenger. I actually think this could be even more terrifying that riding passenger in a car being driven beyond what you judge to the the driver’s level of skill, but it’s not so far removed from one of the proposals during Audi’s last Urban Future Initiative, where one team proposed a “thrill mode” that would have your car drift (safely) on its way to work, road conditions permitting.
Columbus wants as much data and analysis as it can get to help it become a smart city – and it’s asking for your help.
The city is making available datasets used in applying for the $40 million federal transportation grant awarded to Columbus last year in the Smart City Challenge. It wants the Smart Columbus Sandbox to be used as a tool for developers to experiment with the data.
The sandbox – you can play around in it – is part of the integrated data exchange, a cloud-based platform that…
John Oliver has again fired off his quick wit at the new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and the Trump administration for trying to roll back Obama-era Net Neutrality rules.
This isn’t the first time Oliver has addressed the issue of an “open internet,” as he touched on the topic back in 2014 during his fifth episode of Last Week Tonight. In that episode, he identified then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler as a dingo. Ring any bells?
This time, Oliver is going after the new Chairman and ISPs to bring to light the effort to roll back net neutrality rules.
For those of us who need a brush up on the matter, it’s rather simple:
ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon etc. are currently forbidden from favoring one website over another by giving them a “fast lane.” Companies don’t like that. You can obviously imagine a world where Netflix pays a fee to ISPs to be served to its consumers faster than Hulu, limiting consumer choice and killing industry competition across the internet.
It’s this “fast lane” that Oliver seeks to stop.
But we all know Oliver can deliver his own speech far better than I, so without further ado, check out this kick-ass diatribe from the man himself:
The website to which Oliver pushes viewers (http://ift.tt/2plaFGb) seems to be giving the FCC some trouble as the comments form is not loading for certain people. We reached out to the FCC to see if the service issue on its website is related to Oliver’s call to action (of course it is) and if it has been resolved so that people can continue complaining.
We haven’t heard back.
Disclosure: Verizon owns Aol (or Oath?), and Aol owns TechCrunch.
It’s been a rough week in Mac security. First, Checkpoint warned users of a Trojan spreading in Europe that was the first of its kind. And now, one of the most prominent video transcoding apps for Mac has a malware problem.
The developers of the transcoding software Handbrake have issued a statement that warns one of the mirror sites to download the software has been compromised by hackers. The post explains that anyone who has downloaded the software between May 2nd and 6th of this year has a 50/50 chance of being infected. But, it’s probably a good idea just to double check if you’ve downloaded it anytime recently.
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According to yesterday’s alert, the installer file on the mirror server download.handbrake.fr (HandBrake-1.0.7.dmg) was replaced by a malicious file. The malware is a variant of OSX.PROTON, it gives a hacker root access privileges to the system. Back in February, Apple had to issue an update to XProtect to account for the original Proton and on Saturday, the company began the process of updating for the this latest variant. It should automatically download for most users.
Here’s how to detect and remove it:
Detection
If you see a process called “Activity_agent” in the OSX Activity Monitor application. You are infected.
For reference, if you’ve installed a HandBrake.dmg with the following checksums, you will also be infected:
Then Remove any “HandBrake.app” installs you may have.
For the sake of precaution, users should change passwords stored in any OSX or browser keychains. While primary mirror site and the automatic updater on versions 1.0 or later weren’t affected, anyone who uses Handbrake should just make sure.
Reader mirandakatz writes: It’s the 10th anniversary of Scratch, the kids programming language that’s become a popular tool for training the next generation of minds in computer science. But as Steven Levy writes at Backchannel, Scratch’s real value is how it imparts lessons in sharing, logic, and hackerism: ‘A product of the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is steeped in a complicated set of traditions — everything from educational philosophy to open source activism and the pursuit of artificial life. The underpinnings of this tool subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, convey a set of values through its use… These values include reverence of logic, an unshakeable belief in the power of collaboration, and a celebration of the psychic and tangible rewards of being a maker.’
An oil refinery is an industrial cathedral, a place of power, drama and dark recesses: ornate cracking towers are its gothic pinnacles, flaring gas its stained glass, the stench of hydrocarbons its heady incense. Data centres, in contrast, offer a less obvious spectacle: windowless grey buildings that boast no height or ornament, they seem to stretch to infinity. Yet the two have much in common. From an article on The Economist:
A new commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era (Editor’s note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). These titans — Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft — look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year. Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as Standard Oil was in the early 20th century.
I just migrated my photos off of Flickr. Yes, it’s 2017, and I was still using Flickr. Why? Because I’d been using it since 2005, it’s free, and the mobile app is… fine. But now that it seems like Flickr is joining the likes of AOL and Earthlink in the internet graveyard, it’s clearly time to leave. Why did it take this long for me to leave to begin with?
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First off, let’s talk about why someone would want to leave Flickr, even if it might seem obvious to anyone who’s attempted to use the service in the last couple years. Beyond the fundamental lack of development in Flickr, including the fact they pulled support for free automatic photo uploads, there was that massive Yahoo hack they revealed last year, which turned out to be worse than initially thought. Then, a few months ago, Verizon purchased Yahoo, which puts Flickr’s future up in the air. All these factors combined were enough of a signal to me that it was time to go. But it still took months of convincing myself to do so.
The Longer You’re With a Service, the Harder It Is To Leave
The sunk cost fallacy is a term that pops up with work or financial investments a lot, but it’s applicable here as well. The idea behind sunk cost is the more you invest in something, the harder it is to abandon it. If you’ve ever woken up one day and realized you’re using some outdated, junky app that barely works because it’s what you’ve always used, then you know exactly how sunk cost works.
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I had invested a lot of time in Flickr. I’d spent hours uploading photos. Hooked up IFTTT recipes that scooped up photos from Facebook and Instagram, and created shared vacation albums. As time went on, I sunk more and more time into Flickr, even though I knew the service was never going to get updated. When I signed up for Flickr eons ago, there weren’t a lot of options, but even two or three years ago the likes of Google Photos and even Apple Photos had outpaced Flickr. Too bad though, because I’d spent so much time learning the ins and outs of Flickr’s increasingly dated system that it felt too complicated to leave it. I hated Flickr the last couple years but I also didn’t have to think too hard about how to use it. Sure, it had its quirks, but I’d worked them into my workflow and I could use it without a ton of thought.
So I continued to use Flickr because I felt like the time it would take to research alternatives and migrate over wasn’t worth it. This is the exact same thinking that prevents us from quitting stupid projects, or even playing a dumb game. As humans, we often prefer to stay the course and persevere in the hopes that things will get better. Once we’ve spent a lot of time on something, it feels like a waste to let go of it.
Web Services Make It Hard to Leave on Purpose
The difficulty that comes from trying to leave a service isn’t all in your head. Web services are notorious for making it difficult to leave. It turns out that Flickr might be one of the worst offenders.
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To download all your photos from Flickr, you have to select every single photo, move it to an album, and then download that album. When you do so, Flickr breaks that album down into separate ZIP downloads. In my case, I had 12 archives to download. Each ZIP was about 1GB in size, and each one failed to download three or four times. One of those archives refused to download at all. That meant that I would sit there, waiting for the archive to download, then for no reason whatsoever, it would quit, cancel the download, and I’d have to start over. As best as I could tell, this was because the connection speed with Flickr was awful, but I tried it over the course of several days, on different browsers, and even on different computers, all with the same result.
Eventually, I tracked down Flickr Downloadr, which, although archaic at a glance, could at least download all my photos in bulk. And then I had to install a few different frameworks to get the app to run. Once I did that and got used to the fact the app wasn’t entirely in English, I was able to download all my photos.
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Over the years, we’ve talked more and more about the importance of data portability to a point where it’s now one of the most most important aspects to consider about any service. The fact is, no app or service will last forever, and at some point, whether it’s because the company does something stupid, the service goes under, it gets bought out, or it starts to suck, you will want to leave. The ability to do so is important. I even pay for my notes app now because it offers easy data portability.
Here’s one more sad confession about my relationship with Flickr: I actually tried to leave a couple years ago and migrate everything to Google Photos but gave up halfway through because I had the same download issues I experienced more recently. This made the second attempt all the more difficult, because not only did I have the sunk cost of my time with Flickr, I also had the sunk cost of one failed migration to deal with.
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This time, I suffered through it, and after a week, I finally had my photos downloaded and accessible.
Flickr’s bullshit download capabilities are bad, but it’s not like they’re the only ones who do this. Apple is notorious for making it hard to export your files, and a lot of productivity apps—to-do apps especially—make it impossible to move over to something else using any type of automated service. Even leaving a service that seems simple, like Evernote, can get complicated and you’ll lose some of your formatting in the process. Flickr, for all its clunkiness and all-around outdated design, at least kept my photos in their original resolution and format.
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Anyway, I took two lessons away from this whole stupid process: don’t let the time you’ve spent on something prevent you from leaving it, and make sure it’s easy to take your data with you whenever you sign up for a new service.