"Ford Motor Company may soon press dealership service centers to prioritize maintenance and repairs for ride-sharing fleets and their employees. This comes after the company’s decision to expand its in-house shuttling firm, known as Chariot, and as its long-term plan to bring an autonomous ride-sharing solution to market by 2021 takes shape. But Ford also knows rival companies can be a strong source of revenue. Omnicraft, anyone?
Even moderately sized cities have several thousand Uber and Lyft drivers, and Ford’s CEO of Smart Mobility Raj Rao thinks they represent an untapped resource. He believes service centers should go the extra mile for them, even if it means some dealerships have to stay open 24 hours to provide swift turnarounds. "
"The odds favor a hotter than average summer for much of the Western U.S., and a closer to average one for the Eastern U.S., according to the May seasonal forecasts from The Weather Company’s WSI branch, and Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). Meteorological summer began on June 1, and the first week of summer has been on the cool side for much of the United States. However, a shift in the jet stream pattern is coming late this week and into early next week, which will bring hot conditions to much of the eastern half of the U.S. WSI anticipates the possibility of a weak El Nino late summer, perhaps with enough influence on the tropical atmosphere to limit the magnitude of the heat across the northern Plains, Great Lakes, and Eastern U.S. Similarly, in an outlook issued in mid-May, a model-based outlook from IRI and NOAA gave slightly-better-than-even odds of El Niño developing. However, the offiical NOAA/IRI forecast from early May has lower odds, between 40% and 50%. If El Niño does not develop, the odds of stronger and more widespread U.S. heat this summer will rise."
"NOAA is predicting increased odds of a hot summer not only for the Western U.S., but also for the South and Northeast. WSI also predicts a hot summer for the Southeast during July and August. So, what does this mean for air pollution levels this summer?"
"But in this country, we forced people into toxic neighborhoods based on the color of their skin, and it still plays an overwhelming role in which people gets a real shot to be healthy, happy, and hopeful. In other words, the walls are still there."
"Researchers have generally blamed the performance gap on careless work by builders, overly complicated energy-saving technology, or the bad behaviors of the eventual occupants of a building. But in a new study, Coley and his co-authors put much of the blame on inept energy modeling. The title of the study asks the provocative question “Are Modelers Literate?” Even more provocatively, a press release from the University of Bath likens the misleading claims about building energy performance to the Volkswagen emissions scandal, in which actual emissions from diesel engine cars were up to 40 times higher than “the performance promised by the car manufacturer.”
"That legal assessment of the defeat device scandal seems to have held up as the researchers analyzed the cars’ code. The VWs and Audis in question checked for a number of parameters at startup, and if a lab test was a possibility, the car would start with that assumption, enabling full emissions controls. The code permitted the car “to operate... as if two distinct personalities took turns controlling the vehicle,” the paper’s authors wrote.
The paper also notes that the researchers tested the diesel Fiat 500X because it used the same Engine Control Unit from Bosch as the Volkswagens and Audis did. There was no mention of the “acoustic condition” in the Fiat’s function sheet, but some undisclosed code was discovered controlling how the car regenerates its NOx Storage Catalyst (NSC).
“Unlike the Volkswagen defeat device, the FCA [Fiat Chrysler Automobiles] mechanism relies on time only, reducing the frequency of NSC regenerations 26 minutes 40 seconds after engine start,” the paper notes. In a normal system, the NSC reduces NOx emission by trapping it in a catalyst and then regenerating the catalyst as it gets full.
But regeneration hurts a car’s fuel economy numbers and puts a lot of load on the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF). “By reducing the frequency of NSC regeneration, a manufacturer can improve fuel economy and increase DPF service life, at the cost of increased NOx emissions,” the researchers explained."
"Body cameras are spreading fast through American policing, and they're generating an ocean of video. Axon, a company that provides secure cloud storage for police departments, says it's received more than 4 million hours' worth of video uploads from its clients."
"Almost without exception, those videos are controlled by the law enforcement agencies that created them. Some are now challenging that practice and proposing alternatives."
