Month: October 2017

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SolarCity, the solar energy company Tesla acquired last year, has fired hundreds of additional workers, according to six anonymous sources who talked to CNBC. These dismissals are in addition to hundreds more that were announced earlier this month, and they are on top of previously announced layoffs, CNBC reports. All told, around 1,200 people at Tesla and SolarCity have lost their jobs in the recent wave of dismissals, employees told CNBC.

Reached by e-mail, Tesla referred back to a statement sent out earlier this month when the initial firings were announced. "As with any company, especially one of over 33,000 employees, performance reviews occasionally result in employee departures," the company wrote in early October. The company says that recent departures were part of the same review process. The company also emphasized that the process also led to "recognition of top performers with additional compensation and equity awards."

Some employees weren't happy with how the process was carried out. SolarCity employees told CNBC that they "were surprised to be told they were fired for performance reasons, claiming Tesla had not conducted performance reviews since acquiring the solar energy business."

Enlarge / A recent drought in Texas, which led to agricultural losses, has been tied to our warming planet. (credit: Bob Nichols, USDA)

The US Government Accountability Office is a nonpartisan organization that performs analysis and investigations for the Senate and House. Recently, two senators—Maine Republican Susan Collins and Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell—asked it to look into what has become a contentious political issue: the government's response to climate change. The report that resulted suggests that the US is already spending money to respond to climate change, and it will likely spend more as the Earth continues to warm. But it suggests that the US has no plans for figuring out how best to minimize these costs.

It's a message that's unlikely to go over well with either the current administration or the Republican majority in either house of Congress.

Climate and the economy

The report focuses on the economic costs of climate change and how those costs end up being covered by the federal government. It concludes that the feds faced a bill of $350 billion due to extreme weather and fires, including more than $200 billion for aid and recovery, $90 billion for payouts on crop and flood insurance, and nearly $30 billion for repair to federal facilities. US government scientists expect that extreme events are likely to increase in a warming climate, and the GAO sees no reason to doubt that conclusion, accepting a figure of between $12 and $35 billion of added annual expenses by mid-century. For comparison, the annual budget of NASA is $18 billion.

Enlarge / The two brown, rocky areas near the water's edge used to be islands. (credit: NASA)

Saline lakes, like the Caspian Sea, the Dead Sea, the Salton Sea, and of course the Great Salt Lake, have served as recreational playgrounds and tourist attractions, supported thriving fishing and shipping industries, and yielded minerals to be extracted for commercial and industrial applications. A slightly less quantifiable benefit they used to grant was providing habitats for waterbirds.

But these lakes are getting smaller and smaller—and becoming saltier and saltier—as we siphon off ever more of their water, predominantly for agricultural purposes. A perspective piece published in Nature Geoscience this week entitled “Decline of the world’s saline lakes” bemoans that “the ecosystem services provided by saline lakes are real, but less easily quantified [than the benefits of water consumption], and may have a constituency that is less well established in law, business, and social practice."

The economic benefits of taking water from these lakes for agriculture is apparent, whereas the costs of doing so are not as obvious. But the costs are there. The lakes’ decreasing surface may render their shores inaccessible for mineral extraction. Their increasing salinity may cause the collapse of recreation, tourism, fisheries, and ecosystems, as the species that used to thrive in them can’t tolerate all that salt.

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Google just launched the developer preview of Android 8.1. The headline feature of the OS update seems to be a new "Neural Networks API" (NNAPI), which Google says "provides apps with hardware acceleration for on-device machine learning operations."

"Hardware acceleration" sounds a lot like an API that will make use of the "Pixel Visual Core," the extra Google-designed SoC present in the Pixel 2. We were told Google's chip would be enabled with Android 8.1, but it's odd that Google's announcement doesn't mention it by name. Perhaps the NNAPI will use the Pixel Visual Core on the Pixel 2, but on other devices it will use whatever other special hardware is available.

Other than the "NNAPI," there aren't a ton of changes outlined in Google's documentation. There are a few updates or bug fixes for things like autofill and notifications, but we'll have to dig in ourselves to find any other interesting items.

Enlarge / GENOA, ITALY - MARCH 15: Coal piles sit in the storage yard at the Genoa port on March 15, 2016 in Genoa, Italy. (Photo by Jacopo Raule/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Italy’s economic development minister said the country will commit to phasing out coal in its energy mix, ending all use by 2025 according to Argus Media.

The country follows the UK, Canada, and France in its pledge to end coal use in the coming years. For some countries, the pledge is more meaningful than for others.

In the UK, coal provided around 30 percent of the country’s electricity in 2014, the year before the government pledged to end coal power generation by 2025. Early this year, the UK had its first 24 hours with no coal-fired generation since 1882. The news came along with data from 2016 that reported coal-generated electricity made up just nine percent of the country’s energy mix.

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Apple lowered the specifications for the components that make up the iPhone X’s Face ID sensor to help its supply chain manufacture the upcoming phone faster, according to a new Bloomberg report, but Apple has publicly denied the report.

The report generally highlights the struggles with Apple’s new facial recognition system during the iPhone X manufacturing process. It says the company gave its suppliers the okay to reduce the accuracy of Face ID to speed up production sometime in “early fall.”

The report does not specify how Apple may have reduced the specifications for Face ID or whether the alleged reduction would have any tangible effect for consumers. Apple said that Face ID’s accuracy was 1,000,000:1 when it unveiled the iPhone X in September, well above the one-in-50,000 chance that a user could unlock someone else’s iPhone using the company’s Touch ID fingerprint sensor. The report says Face ID will “probably still be far more accurate than Touch ID,” even with a downgrade.

(credit: Ron Amadeo/Intel)

Google's Pixel 2 smartphone doesn't just have one of the best smartphone cameras ever; it also has custom silicon dedicated to the camera that isn't even active yet. Besides the Snapdragon 835, the Pixel 2 has a whole other SoC for image processing called the "Pixel Visual Core." The chip represents Google's first-ever consumer SoC, but Google didn't build the chip on its own. CNBC found out the chip was a collaboration between Intel and Google.

CNBC made the connection after seeing that the serial number of the chip starts with "SR3," which is also used on some Intel chips. The outlet ran its scoop by Google, which confirmed Intel was involved.

Knowing that Intel helped with the development of the chip was enough information to start digging with, since anything touched by Intel is probably related to the camera chip, right? This led me to the codeword "Easel," which, sure enough, seems to be Google's codename for the Pixel Visual Core. You can poke around platform/hardware/google/easel/ in the Android source, where you'll find the few bits of related code that are currently public. Opening up the device-tree blob binary present on the Pixel 2 also prominently shows the word "Monette Hill," which sounds like some kind of Intel codename.