Day: July 5, 2019

The first independent evaluation of the Metropolitan police’s use of face recognition systems warned it is “highly possible” it would be ruled unlawful if challenged in court.

The news: London’s police force has conducted 10 trials of face recognition technology since 2016, using Japanese company NEC’s Neoface system. It commissioned academics from the University of Essex to independently assess the scheme, and they concluded that the system is 81% inaccurate (in other words, the vast majority of people it flags up to the police are not on a wanted list.) They found that, of 42 matches, only eight were confirmed to be correct, Sky News reports.

Police pushback: The Met police insists its technology only makes an error in one in 1,000 instances, but it hasn’t shared its methodology for arriving at that statistic.

Rising fears: As face recognition technology becomes more ubiquitous, there’s growing concern about the gender and racial bias embedded into many systems. With that (and other concerns) in mind, San Francisco banned its use by public agencies last month. That doesn’t do anything to stop its use proliferating in the private sector, but at least it might mean it can’t be wielded by authorities with the power to arrest you. 

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The way the world gets its electricity is undergoing a rapid transition, driven by both the increased urgency of decarbonizing energy systems and the plummeting costs of wind and solar technology. In the past decade electricity generated by renewables in the U.S. has doubled, primarily from wind and solar installations, according to the Energy Information Administration. In January 2019 the EIA forecast that wind, solar and other nonhydroelectric renewables would be the fastest-growing slice of the electricity portfolio for the next two years. But the intermittent nature of those sources means that electric utilities need a way to keep energy in their back pocket for when the sun is not shining and the winds are calm. That need is increasing interest in energy-storage technology—in particular, lithium-ion batteries, which are finally poised to be more than just a bit player in the grid.

For decades pumped-storage hydropower, a simple process that features reservoirs at different elevations, has been the dominant large-scale energy-storage method in the U.S. To store energy, water is pumped into the higher reservoir; when that energy is needed, the water is released into the lower reservoir, flowing through a turbine along the way. Pumped-storage hydropower currently accounts for 95 percent of U.S. utility-scale energy storage, according to the Department of Energy. But as efficiency and reliability have improved, and manufacturing costs have tumbled, lithium-ion batteries have surged. They account for more than 80 percent of the U.S.’s utility-scale battery-storage power capacity, which jumped from just a few megawatts a decade ago to 866 megawatts by February 2019, the EIA says. A March 2019 analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports that the cost of electricity from such batteries has dropped by 76 percent since 2012, making them close to competitive with the plants, typically powered by natural gas, that are switched on during times of high electricity demand. To date, whereas batteries have largely been used to make brief, quick adjustments to maintain power levels, utilities in several states, including Florida and California, are adding lithium-ion batteries that will be able to last for two to four hours. Energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates that the market for energy storage will double from 2018 to 2019 and triple from 2019 to 2020.

Lithium-ion batteries will likely be the dominant technology for the next five to 10 years, according to experts, and continuing improvements will result in batteries that can store four to eight hours of energy—long enough, for example, to shift solar-generated power to the evening peak in demand.

But getting to the point where renewables and energy storage can handle the baseline load of electricity generation will take energy storage at longer timescales, which will mean moving beyond lithium-ion batteries. Potential candidates range from other high-tech options, such as flow batteries, which pump liquid electrolytes, and hydrogen fuel cells to simpler concepts, such as pumped-storage hydropower and what is called gravity storage. Pumped-storage hydropower is cheap once it is installed, but it is expensive to build and can be used only in certain terrain. Similarly simple is the concept of gravity storage, which purports to use spare electricity to raise a heavy block that can later be lowered to drive a turbine to generate electricity. Although a few companies are working on demonstrations and have attracted investments, the idea has yet to take off. Other options are still under development to make them sufficiently reliable, efficient and cost-competitive with lithium-ion batteries. There were only three large-scale flow-battery storage systems deployed in the U.S. by the end of 2017, according to the EIA, and utility-scale hydrogen systems remain in demonstration stages. The U.S. government is funding some work in this arena, particularly through the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), but much of the investment in those technologies—and in energy storage in general—is happening in China and South Korea, which have also ramped up storage research.

It is uncertain whether and how much the costs of energy storage will continue to decline. Yet the accumulating pledges by governments—including at the state and local level in the U.S.—to achieve carbon-free electricity production will provide a continued push to bring more and more storage online.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK’s independent industry self-regulation group, has officially determined the lower boundary for who counts as an internet “celebrity”: It’s anyone with over 30,000 followers on social media.

Per the Telegraph, the decision comes by way of a case involving pharmaceutical company Sanofi, which paid mommy blogger Sarah Willox Knott (@ThisMamaLife) to endorse a sleeping sedative on Instagram. In the post, Knox wrote that she was a “night owl” who found that the drug was a great “pharmacy only, short term solution to insomnia.”

The post was marked as an ad in compliance with the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) code and pre-approved by the Proprietary Association of Great Britain trade group, the Telegraph reported. But the ASA determined that Knox’s 32,000 followers technically qualified her as a celebrity—and thus the posting violated rules that prohibit “celebrities or health professionals from endorsing medical products.”

Sanofi argued that Knox had a considerably smaller following than “recognised celebrities” on Instagram, specifically citing soccer star David Beckham’s 55 million followers and comedian Stephen Fry’s 359,000, according to Ars Technica. This did not work.

“We considered over 30,000 followers indicated that she had the attention of a significant number of people,” the ASA concluded. “Given that she was popular with, and had the attention of a large audience, we considered that ThisMamaLife was a celebrity for the purposes of the CAP Code.”

However, the Telegraph reported that though this is a “new precedent, the watchdog will still judge whether posts from smaller social media accounts breech its endorsement rules on a case-by-case basis.”

So there you have it. Pass that sweet, sweet 30k and you have all the IRL bragging rights in the world that you are technically a celebrity, or something, as determined by a UK-based advertising agency self-regulatory organization on a case-by-case basis. Spread the news! Everyone in the room will pause what they’re doing, stare at you, then start a slow clap and begin cheering “Influencer! Influencer! Influencer!” Dollar bills will somehow rain from the ceiling, and one of the Kardashians will be there, crying a single tear of joy. Also, Jordan Peterson will be there for some reason, staring at you morosely.

People will definitely not just look at you funny and hope you switch to a different subject.

In the U.S., standards on social media advertising are more than a bit looser. After years of pretty much everyone looking the other way on shady influencer tactics like endorsing products without disclosing it’s a paid advertisement as legally required, the Federal Trade Commission issued a number of warnings in 2017—though Morning Consult reported in October 2018 that the FTC said “it has not taken any public actions against noncompliant influencers since last year” and violations remain rampant.

[The Telegraph]