A Chinese city is using big data provided by a phone company to track the movement of its migrant worker population, expanding the many ways China is using big data to not just enhance performance but also track the daily lives of its citizens.

“When you buy a mobile phone SIM card, you need to register your identity information,” said an officer of China Mobile designated at the company’s booth during the recent Big Data Expo in southwest China’s Guiyang city. He was explaining how the mobile phone company is assisting Guiyang police about the movement of migrants in the city on a real-time basis.

“So, we can obtain information about the people in a given area and details like whether they are men or women, their age, and where they come from,” he said.

Very suddenly, big data is set to take up many of the responsibilities of the Communist Party’s feedback mechanism. It is also expected to act as feedstock for the anti-corruption campaign, which has been using information about spending on wines and luxury buying for the purpose of investigations.

Social profiling

China has already introduced a system data-driven social credit rating system in 40 towns and cities, which will be expanded to the entire country by 2020.

Information about a person buying expensive wine, foreign luxury goods or an air ticket would be fed into a giant system which will analyze blocks of data to keep the government informed about the situation on the ground.

The tracking of people posting critical comments in social media is already going on and social media data will also be fed into the system, which goes far beyond financial credit ratings practiced in developed countries. Here, the system isn’t focused entirely on debts and earnings, but on economic and social behaviors with an intention to allocate rewards and punishments.

China’s Internet-based companies are eagerly joining the government’s grand experiment. Mobike, a bike hiring company is giving out award points for bicycle users to voluntarily inspect parked bikes and inform the company about the misbehavior of other bikers.

A big data based information system might help improve the working of the police force in some respects. Officials in the government’s education and health departments said big data is being introduced as a tool improve delivery systems.

Risks for many

But it can also help authorities in tracking the movement of political dissidents, journalists, NGO workers, foreign companies and individuals, analysts said.

“For international companies operating in China, the Social Credit System poses significant challenges,” Mirjam Meissner, an expert with Mercator Institute of China Studies in Berlin, said. “They will probably be fully integrated into the system’s mechanisms and could see their freedom of decision-making in China significantly constrained,” she said.

At the same time, the rating system could create a more level playing field, since both domestic and international companies would be subject to the same rating mechanisms, Meissner said.

Kweichow Moutai Group, which produces high-end wines, has introduced a mobile phone app and encourages buyers to make online purchases.

“We monitor online sales to analyze the proportion of our potential users and our actual users. So, we can allocate our promotion efforts in different regions based on the information,” an official posted at the company’s booth at the Guiyang Big Data Expo said.

“The data is only for decision-making support to our company, and our data is not being made public,” he said.

However, officials from several companies confirmed that they routinely share data with government departments. For instance, the government’s tourism department collects data from online ticket selling companies and airlines to determine the flow of Chinese tourists to specific countries, and judge which destination is attracting high-spenders.

This information is seen as a major asset for the government, which is anxious about the movement of money and talent out of China. In addition, China is widely believed to use tourism as a political lever in dealing with foreign governments.

For instance, it is believed to have actively discouraged the movement of Chinese tourists to South Korea during the recent controversy over the installation of the U.S.-made THAAD anti-missile system. China and South Korea are now discussing the resumption of tourist flows as part of a new effort to mend forces.

 
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Apple nodded to several up-and-coming technology trends, unveiling a new “smart” home speaker and device features touching on virtual reality, online privacy and a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning.

The “HomePod” speaker unveiled Monday is similar to devices from rivals, some of which have been on the market for years. Like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, the HomePod will play music while also helping people to manage their lives and homes. Siri will be voice activated to respond to requests for information and other help around the house.

It is the first new device Apple has announced in almost three years. It unveiled the Apple Watch in September 2014.

Apple “can’t afford to yield valuable real-estate in the heart of people’s homes to Amazon, Google and others,” said Geoff Blaber, research analyst at CCS Insight. That’s especially important because people are starting to access information, entertainment and search in a more “pervasive” way that’s less dependent on smarthphones, he said.

The speaker will sell for about $350 in December in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Amazon sells the main version of the Echo for $180; Google’s Home speaker goes for $130.

The Echo, released in 2015, and Google Home, released last year, were the first entrants in a promising market. The research firm eMarketer says than 35 million people in the U.S. are expected to use a voice-activated speaker at least once a month this year, more than double its estimate from last year.

Keeping It Real With VR

New iMacs unveiled Monday at Apple’s annual conference for software programmers are getting better displays and graphics capabilities. Apple said that makes the Mac a great platform for development virtual-reality “experiences.”

But Apple is late to the game on VR. Samsung and Google already have VR systems centered on their smartphones. Facebook, HTC and Sony have high-end VR systems, too.

Virtual reality has been described as the next big thing for decades. But so far, interest has been strongest among gamers, developers and hardware makers rather than everyday users.

Apple’s entry into the market could change this. Its entry into digital-music sales with iTunes, and into the smartphone market with the iPhone, upended those industries and gave them mass appeal.

New iPhone Features

New features coming to iPhones and iPads include messages that sync to Apple servers in the cloud. These devices will only keep the most recent messages in local storage.

For photos, Apple is turning to a “high efficiency” format to replace the widely used JPEG standard. Although the format is not exclusive to Apple, it’s not yet clear how well the photos will work with non-Apple software and devices, which mostly use JPEG.

Apple is also bringing the ability to send money to friends or other people through its payment service, Apple Pay. So far, the service has limited payments to purchases of products and services from companies and other organizations.

The free software update for mobile devices, iOS 11, is expected in September, when Apple typically releases new iPhones.

Mac Gets an Upgrade

Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the latest operating system for Mac computers. Called High Sierra, it recognizes more faces automatically, which should make it easier to organize photos, and will offer more photo editing tools.

Safari, Apple’s web browser, seeks to make users’ online experience smoother and less annoying. It will allow users to automatically block auto-play videos by detecting videos that shouldn’t be playing when you open a webpage to read an article, for example.

The browser’s new “intelligent tracking prevention,” meanwhile, will use machine learning to identify and block digital-ad trackers in order to keep advertisers from following and profiling users. It will not block the ads themselves, though.

Sizing Up the iPad

Apple is introducing an iPad Pro in a new size in an attempt to revive interest in its once hot-selling line of tablets. The new 10.5-inch model offers room for a full-size keyboard, something the 9.7 inch model couldn’t. Yet it isn’t as bulky as the 12.9-inch model.

With consumers less interested in buying new tablets, Apple has increased its focus on designing tablets for professionals to do much of the same work that they usually perform on a laptop computer. It’s also what Microsoft is targeting with the Surface Pro; a new model comes out on June 15.

The new iPad Pro also comes with a better camera — the same one found in the iPhone 7 — along with more storage, a better display and faster refreshing of moving images. The new model starts at $649 and will start shipping next week.

Watch the Watch

Apple is also updating the operating software for its Apple Watch, including new watch faces, more personalized alerts that use machine learning to tailor information to you based on your routines and tastes.

It also enhanced its workout app to, for instance, support high intensity interval training. It will also be possible to exchange data between gym equipment and the watch.

In a nod to Amazon streaming fans, Apple is also bringing Amazon Prime to its Apple TV app.
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Apple appears poised to unveil a voice-activated, internet-connected speaker that would create a new digital pipeline into people’s homes.

Tapping Apple’s Siri digital assistant, such a speaker is expected to serve as a butler as well as an outlet for listening to music. If the speculation pans out, the speaker would be Apple’s first new product since its smartwatch in 2015. And it would mark an effort by Apple to catch up with Amazon and Google.

An early glimpse at updates to iPhone and Mac software has become a tradition at Apple’s annual conference for app developers, which begins Monday in San Jose, California. But Apple occasionally also uses the event to introduce new devices and services and upgrades to existing products.

Amazon introduced the Echo speaker, featuring its Alexa assistant, in 2015. Google followed with its Home speaker, featuring its plain-named Assistant, last year. Both speakers can respond to voice requests for the news, weather and tasks such as turning on the lights.

More than 35 million people in the U.S. are expected to use a voice-activated speaker at least once a month this year, more than doubling from last year, according the research firm eMarketer.

“There is so much momentum building around these speakers that it would be difficult for Apple not to come out with one,” said industry analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy.

Amazon just unveiled a version of Echo with a camera, touch-screen display and video-calling capabilities. The new Echo Show goes on sale on June 28 for $230. Google, meanwhile, previewed new speaker features such as hands-free phone calling during its software conference last month. Microsoft also has announced its own speaker with Samsung’s Harman business; it will use Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant.

That leaves Apple. Although it was the first smartphone maker to come out with a digital assistant when Siri debuted in 2011, it hasn’t had a stand-alone assistant. For Apple, having one would further broaden the role that its software, services and gadgets play in people’s lives.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Apple hopped on the bandwagon of a technology product popularized by a competitor. For instance, Apple initially resisted enlarging the size of iPhone’s screen despite strong sales for larger-display phones made by Samsung and other rivals. But the company relented, and Apple’s larger phones have become hot commodities as more people have embraced having a bigger display to look at pictures and watch video on the devices.

Although Siri would likely be a centerpiece of a smart speaker from Apple, Moorhead said the device’s design, colors and acoustics will also likely be focal points because the company has a long history of making elegantly designed products.

The lack of a breakthrough device has periodically raised concerns that Apple has become too dependent on the iPhone and supported the theory that the company lost its knack for innovation when its co-founder Steve Jobs died of cancer in 2011. Although Apple Watch has emerged as the leader in its technological niche, it hasn’t become a smash hit like the iPhone or the iPad – at least until tablet sales started declining.

On the software front, RBC Capital analyst Amit Daryanani expects the iOS 11 – the next operating system for Apple’s iPhones and iPads – to get an overhaul that will accommodate the anticipated removal of the home button from the 10th anniversary model of the iPhone due out later this year. The next iOS may also have new features designed for artificial intelligence, the application of computers that learn and understand things like humans.

Apple also may introduce its next Mac computer, along with the next operating system powering the machine. Software updates are also expected for Apple’s smartwatch and TV box for streaming online video. Daryanani said Apple may also announce an iPad Pro with a faster processor in an attempt to revive its long-slumping tablet sales.
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Facebook said it wanted to make its social media platform a “hostile environment” for terrorists in a statement issued after attackers killed seven people in London and prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to demand action from internet firms.

Three attackers rammed a rental van into pedestrians on London Bridge and stabbed others nearby on Saturday night in Britain’s third major militant attack in recent months.

May responded to the attack by calling for an overhaul of the strategy used to combat extremism, including a demand for greater international regulation of the internet, saying big internet companies were partly responsible for providing extreme ideology the space to develop.

Facebook on Sunday said it condemned the London attacks.

“We want Facebook to be a hostile environment for terrorists,” said Simon Milner, Director of Policy at Facebook in an emailed statement.

“Using a combination of technology and human review, we work aggressively to remove terrorist content from our platform as soon as we become aware of it, and if we become aware of an emergency involving imminent harm to someone’s safety, we notify law enforcement.”

May has previously put pressure on internet firms to take more responsibility for content posted on their services. Last month she pledged, if she wins an upcoming election, to create the power to make firms pay towards the cost of policing the internet with an industry-wide levy.

Twitter also said it was working to tackle the spread of militant propaganda on its platform.

“Terrorist content has no place on Twitter,” Nick Pickles, UK head of public policy at Twitter, said in a statement, adding that in the second half of 2016 it had suspended nearly 400,000 accounts.

“We continue to expand the use of technology as part of a systematic approach to removing this type of content.
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The applications for 3-D printing keep coming. We’ve reported on 3-D printers being used in everything from robotics to games to baking. But now comes a sweet way to turn melted chocolate into works of art. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The applications for 3-D printing keep coming. We’ve reported on 3-D printers being used in everything from robotics to games to baking. But now comes a sweet way to turn melted chocolate into works of art. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Apple is expected to announce plans next week to make its Siri voice assistant work with a larger variety of apps, as the technology company looks to counter the runaway success of Amazon.com’s competing Alexa service.

But the Cupertino, California, company is likely to stick to its tested method of focusing on a small amount of features and trying to perfect them, rather than casting as wide a net as possible, according to engineers and artificial intelligence industry insiders.

Currently, Apple’s Siri works with only six types of apps: ride-hailing and sharing; messaging and calling; photo search; payments; fitness; and auto infotainment systems. At the company’s annual developer conference next week, it is expected to add to those categories.

Some industry-watchers have also predicted Apple will announce hardware similar to Amazon’s Echo device for the home, which has been a hot-seller recently. Apple declined comment.

But even if Siri doubles its areas of expertise, it will be a far cry from the 12,000 or so tasks that Amazon.com’s Alexa can handle.

Apple vs Amazon

The difference illustrates a strategic divide between the two tech rivals. Apple is betting that customers will not use voice commands without an experience similar to speaking with a human, and so it is limiting what Siri can do in order to make sure it works well.

Amazon puts no such restrictions on Alexa, wagering that the voice assistant with the most “skills,” its term for apps on its Echo assistant devices, will gain a loyal following, even if it sometimes makes mistakes and takes more effort to use.

The clash of approaches is coming to a head as virtual assistants that respond to voice commands become a priority for the leading tech companies, which want to find new ways of engaging customers and make more money from shopping and online services.

Siri vs Alexa

Now, an iPhone user can say, “Hey Siri, I’d like a ride to the airport” or “Hey Siri, order me a car,” and Siri will open the Uber or Lyft ride service app and start booking a trip.

Apart from some basic home and music functions, Alexa needs more specific directions, using a limited set of commands such as “ask” or “tell.” For example, “Alexa, ask Uber for a ride,” will start the process of summoning a car, but “Alexa, order me an Uber” will not, because Alexa does not make the connection that it should open the Uber.

After some setup, Alexa can order a pizza from Domino’s, while Siri cannot get a pie because food delivery is not — so far — one of the categories of apps that Apple has opened up to Siri.

“In typical Apple fashion, they’ve allowed for only a few use cases, but they do them very well,” said Charles Jolley, chief executive of Ozlo, maker of an intelligent assistant app.

Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said the company does not comment on its plans for developers.

Amazon said in a statement: “Our goal is to make speaking with Alexa as natural and easy as possible, so we’re looking at ways to improve this over time.”

Side dish, not entree

Apple’s narrower focus could become a problem, said Matt McIlwain, a venture capitalist with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group.

The potential of Apple’s original iPhone did not come to light until thousands of developers started building apps.

McIlwain said he expects Apple to add new categories at its Worldwide Developers Conference next week, but not nearly enough to match Alexa’s number of skills.

“To attract developers in the modern world, you need a platform,” McIlwain said. “If Apple does not launch a ‘skills store,’ that would be a mistake.”

Neither Siri nor Alexa has a clear path to making money.

Siri works as an additional tool for controlling traditional apps, and Apple pays money to owners of those apps. Alexa’s skills are free, and developers are not paid.

At the moment, because of their limits, voice apps are “a side dish, not the entree,” according to Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
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The world is watching closely as food shortages grip parts of Africa and the Middle East. As humanitarian groups respond to the crisis, they have to solve a major problem: how to track food security in areas that are simply too remote or too dangerous to access.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) has come up with an innovative answer. The U.S.-funded organization is working with DigitalGlobe, a Colorado satellite company, to crowdsource analysis of satellite imagery of South Sudan.

The effort will rely on thousands of volunteers — normal people with no subject matter expertise — to scour satellite images looking for things like livestock herds, temporary dwellings and permanent dwellings. The group has selected an area of 18,000 square kilometers across five counties in South Sudan to analyze.

“The crowd can identify settlement imagery, they can identify roads, hospitals, airplanes, you name it. It allows us to tap into this network of folks around the world, not necessarily in country, but they are folks who are interested and compelled by whatever the campaign is,” said Rhiannan Price, senior manager of the Seeing a Better World Program at DigitalGlobe.

“Rather than clicking through your phone and passively taking in information, our users are actively engaging and putting information back out there that is really helpful for our partners.”

DigitalGlobe’s platform, known as Tomnod, has more than 2 million unique users. Other crowdsourcing observation campaigns using satellite imagery include the effects of a wildfire in South Africa and counting seals in Antarctica.

But the work is particularly valuable in South Sudan, where an estimated 100,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in the five-county area because of violence. Conflict-ridden South Sudan is the only place in the world where famine has been declared in the past six years.

“For humanitarians to cover that kind of ground, especially when it’s insecure, is just not a safe approach,” said Price. “Satellite imagery offers a really helpful tool when it comes to assessing and evaluating what’s happening on the ground, trying to find those folks so we can get resources and actually quantify the situation there.”

DigitalGlobe owns and operates a constellation of high-resolution satellites and has collected thousands of recent images of the area in question. In order to best track damage and displacement, they are comparing the images with ones from 2015, when they did a similar project.

Chris Hillbruner, deputy chief of party at FEWSNET, said his organization is trying several innovative approaches in different parts of the world to collect data. In Yemen and northeast Nigeria, it has assembled a network of local data collectors that relays information. It has also launched a pilot project using cellphones to collect wage and market data in Madagascar to determine when laborers are in low demand, signaling a bad year for harvests.

“We’re piloting a variety of tools and I think technology can help us, but I would also say that there are limitations,” Hillbruner said. “At the end of the day, we still get the best information when people are able to go into these areas and get on the ground to collect information about what is happening.”

But high-resolution satellite imagery, where each pixel in the photograph represents 30 centimeters on the ground, may be the next best thing to having a person on the ground.

To date, Tomnod’s team of volunteers has identified more than 180,000 objects of interest, including traditional dwellings known as tukuls and herds of livestock. This is invaluable information that tells humanitarian organizations where they need to send help.

“When you think of some of the drivers behind food insecurity, things like conflict or drought or flood, things that affect food supplies, or affect population migration, those are areas where remote sensing, satellite imagery, really excel in a way that other analyses simply can’t compete with,” Price said.
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Announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump misplaced the blame for what ails the coal industry and laid a shaky factual foundation for his decision. A look at some of the claims in a Rose Garden speech and an accompanying fact sheet about the deal to curtail emissions responsible for global warming:

WHITE HOUSE: The Paris climate accord “would effectively decapitate our coal industry, which now supplies about one-third of our electric power.”

THE FACTS: The U.S. coal industry was in decline long before the Paris accord was signed in 2015. The primary cause has been competition from cleaner-burning natural gas, which has been made cheaper and more abundant by hydraulic fracturing. Electric utilities have been replacing coal plants with gas-fired facilities because they are more efficient and less expensive to operate.

TRUMP: Claims “absolutely tremendous economic progress since Election Day,” adding “more than a million private-sector jobs.”

THE FACTS: That’s basically right, but he earns no credit for jobs created in the months before he became president. To rack up that number, the president had to reach back to October. Even then, private-sector job creation from October through April (171,000 private-sector jobs a month) lags just slightly behind the pace of job creation for the previous six months (172,000), entirely under President Barack Obama.

TRUMP: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

THE FACTS: That may be so, but Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is not Trump country. It voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in November, favoring her by a margin of 56 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. The city has a climate action plan committing to boost the use of renewable energy. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat, has been an outspoken supporter of the Paris accord, and tweeted after Trump’s announcement that “as the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.”

WHITE HOUSE: “According to a study by NERA Consulting, meeting the Obama administration’s requirements in the Paris Accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades. By 2040, our economy would lose 6.5 million industrial sector jobs _ including 3.1 million manufacturing sector jobs.”

THE FACTS: This study was paid for by two groups that have long opposed environmental regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation. Both get financial backing from those who profit from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The latter group has received money from foundations controlled by the Koch brothers, whose company owns refineries and more than 4,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines.

The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting U.S. targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to U.S. businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.

Academic studies have found that increased environmental regulation doesn’t actually have much impact on employment. Jobs lost at polluting companies tend to be offset by new jobs in green technology.

WHITE HOUSE, citing a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “If all member nations met their obligations, the impact on the climate would be negligible,” curbing temperature rise by “less than .2 degrees Celsius in 2100.”

THE FACTS: The co-founder of the MIT program on climate change says the administration is citing an outdated report, taken out of context. Jake Jacoby said the actual global impact of meeting targets under the Paris accord would be to curb rising temperatures by 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

“They found a number that made the point they want to make,” Jacoby said. “It’s kind of a debate trick.”

One degree may not sound like much, but Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, says, “Every tenth of a degree increases the number of unprecedented extreme weather events considerably.”
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When General Motors CEO Mary Barra introduced the Chevrolet Bolt at the CES gadget show last year, she took a shot at Tesla.

Buyers can be confident because Chevy has 3,000 U.S. dealers to service the new electric vehicle, she said. The implication was that Tesla, with just 69 service centers nationwide, can make no such promise.

The uncharacteristic insult from Barra was designed to highlight the difference between 108-year-old GM and Tesla, a disruptive teenager. It also acknowledged a budding rivalry that could help determine whether Detroit or Silicon Valley sets the course for the future of the auto industry.

The tale of the tape favors GM. It has made billions in profits since returning to the public markets in 2010. GM got the Bolt, a $36,000 car that goes 238 miles per charge, to market before Tesla’s Model 3. Tesla, the 14-year-old company led by flamboyant CEO Elon Musk, has never posted an annual profit.

Yet, as both CEOs face shareholders for annual meetings Tuesday, it is Barra who must explain to skeptical investors why GM’s future is as bright as Tesla’s.

GM’s stock is trading around the $33 price of its initial public offering seven years ago. During that time, Tesla shares have soared more than tenfold to $335. Wall Street now values Tesla at about $55 billion, compared to around $50 billion for GM.

Despite efforts to paint themselves as technology companies, automakers can’t shake their giant, capital-intensive global manufacturing operations. The huge investment needed to build vehicles yields low profit margins compared with tech companies that make software or cell phones, says Michael Ramsey, an analyst with Gartner. GM’s net profit margin in 2016 was 5.7 percent. By comparison, Alphabet Inc., parent of Google, had a 22 percent margin.

Although it’s an automaker, Tesla started in the tech bucket and remains there in the eyes of investors and buyers, Ramsey says.

Tesla’s electric cars are the envy of the industry, and its semi-autonomous technology is among the most advanced on the road. Musk says Tesla’s California assembly plant – which used to be GM’s – will soon be among the most efficient in the world. And it’s branching into areas with potential for bigger returns, including solar panels, energy storage and trucking.

Tesla is absurdly overvalued if based on the past, but that’s irrelevant. A stock price represents risk-adjusted future cash flows,” Musk tweeted in April.

Still, Musk can’t risk any missteps as Tesla pivots from a niche manufacturer of 84,000 high-priced cars per year. The Model 3 sedan, Tesla’s first mainstream car, is due out later this year, but previous launches have been plagued with delays. Tesla has yet to prove it can build high-volume vehicles with quality and reliability, as GM does. Musk aims to make 500,000 vehicles per year in 2018; GM made more than 10 million cars and trucks last year.

GM, too, is stretching into new areas. Its Maven car-sharing service has 35,000 members in 17 North American cities, and it’s providing cars for ride-hailing services. GM is developing autonomous cars with Cruise Automation, a software company purchased last year. Its SuperCruise semi-autonomous driving system, due out this year, is designed to be safer than Tesla’s.

And GM isn’t the only automaker with a stagnant stock price. Of the seven best-selling carmakers in the U.S., only Toyota and Fiat Chrysler have seen significant growth in seven years. Ford, Honda and Hyundai all have lost value.

“Investors and the financial markets are much more interested in investing in the potential of what might be huge than in the reality of what’s already profitable and likely to remain so for years to come,” says Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst with Navigant Research.

Abuelsamid says GM could better trumpet its technology achievements. For instance, it scarcely markets the Bolt. By contrast, Musk builds hype with nightclub-like events for Tesla owners and Twitter banter with 8.8 million followers.

“The only way you can get people to perceive you in the same light as a company like Tesla is to demonstrate it,” Abuelsamid says.

Musk is crucial to Tesla’s success. The risk-taking billionaire founded PayPal and rocket company SpaceX before taking over Tesla. He espouses big ideas like Hyperloop high-speed transportation and colonizing Mars.

Barra, on the other hand, is a methodical engineer who rarely strays from script. She has only 29,500 Twitter followers. She’s a GM lifer who earned a company-paid MBA from Stanford; Musk left a Stanford graduate physics program after just two days to form a publishing startup.

“Mary is like a normal high-level performing executive,” Ramsey says. “Elon Musk is like an almost unrivaled superstar, even in comparison to Silicon Valley executives.”

Still, the big changes in the auto industry are in the early stages. Electric vehicles make up less than 1 percent of global auto sales and fully self-driving cars are years away. The economy can falter and company fortunes can shift. Already this year, sales in the U.S. and China are slowing, and GM pulled out of the European and Indian markets because they weren’t profitable.

GM knows the ups and downs of auto sales, but Tesla will have to learn to manage them. If the Model 3 is late and Tesla sales fall, its stock price could drop and reduce Tesla’s access to cheap capital, Ramsey says.

“I don’t think they’re completely immune to economic cycles,” he says. “That will be when we really know if Tesla can maintain this out-of-whack share value with their fundamentals.”
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The United States Army is taking another step toward developing autonomous trucks this month when it tests them on a Michigan highway.

The test, the first on a public road, will feature only flatbed trucks, but the technology could eventually be used in other military vehicles and could help protect troops on the battlefield.

As with the many tests of driverless cars, the trucks will have sensors to stay on course and communicate with one another. Also, like current driverless car efforts, the Army’s test will still see a human behind the wheel just in case something goes wrong.

“In order for automated vehicles to work and work correctly and work safely, that automated vehicle needs to talk very fast, sending data back and forth, first to the vehicles around it,” said Doug Halleaux, public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) in an interview with the Times Herald newspaper.

One potential hurdle the test will have to overcome is crossing a steel girder bridge called the Blue Water Bridge. Researchers say the steel could present a challenge to the radar readings, possibly confusing the autonomous system.

The push for autonomous military vehicles stems from the number of deadly attacks on U.S. military convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Michigan highway will remain open to normal traffic during the testing.
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Social media companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have stepped up both the speed and number of removals of hate speech on their platforms in response to pressure from the European Union to do more to tackle the issue, according to the results of an EU evaluation.

Facebook won particular praise for reviewing most complaints within a 24-hour target timeframe set down in a code of conduct agreed in December by the European Commission,

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube

Calling the results “encouraging” for the Commission’s push for self-regulation, Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said the proportion of offending items taken down had doubled and action was being taken more quickly than when the EU checked six months ago.

“This … shows that a self-regulatory approach can work, if all actors do their part. At the same time, companies … need to make further progress to deliver on all the commitments,” Jourova said in a statement, adding that firms should provide more feedback to people who brought abuses to their attention.

Facebook scored highly on this, Twitter and YouTube less so.

The voluntary code of conduct obliges firms to take action in Europe within 24 hours, following rising concerns about the proliferation of racist and xenophobic content on social media triggered by the refugee crisis and attacks in Western Europe.

This included removing or disabling access to the content if necessary, better cooperation with civil society organizations and the promotion of “counter-narratives” to hate speech.

Facebook assessed notifications of hateful content in less than 24 hours in 58 percent of cases, up from 50 percent in December, according to the report.

Twitter also sped up its dealing with notifications, reviewing 39 percent of them in less than 24 hours, as opposed to 23.5 percent in December, when the Commission first reviewed the companies’ progress and warned them they were being too slow.

YouTube, on the other hand, slowed down, reviewing 42.6 percent of notifications in less than 24 hours, down from 60.8 percent in December, the results showed.

“IT companies have all been improving time and response to notifications on manifest illegal hate speech,” Jourova said at a meeting of the EU High Level Group on combating racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance on Wednesday.

“There are differences among the companies … but we can objectively say that all have improved.”

All the companies significantly increased the number of removals. Overall, content was removed in 59.2 percent of cases, more than double the rate in December which was 28.2 percent.

The proliferation of hate speech on social media has increased pressure on the companies to remove the content swiftly as they face the prospect of legislation at both EU and national level.

Last week EU ministers approved plans to force social networks to take measures to block videos with hateful content while the German government approved a plan in April to fine companies up to 50 million euros if they fail to remove hateful postings quickly.

The most common ground of hate speech the Commission identified was xenophobia, including expressions of hatred against migrants and refugees, together with anti-Muslim hatred, followed by ethnic origin.

The spread of fake news and racist content has taken on more urgency in Germany after the arrival of about a million migrants over the last two years.
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