Self-driving vehicles are already hitting highways and city streets around the world.
Now Volvo wants to put them underground.
The Swedish automaker on Monday announced plans to test a fully autonomous construction truck designed to navigate subterranean mines.
“We are delighted to have already developed a solution that we believe will ultimately revolutionize the mining industry,” Torbjörn Holmström, the chief technology officer of Volvo’s truck group, said in a statement. “We expect to be able to significantly increase our customers’ productivity while at the same time improving fuel efficiency and safety.”
The vehicle looks like a regular dump truck and includes a cab section where a driver could sit and take over the wheel. The project is a joint venture between Volvo and its fellow Swedish carmaker Saab, which owns the software firm, Combitech, that helped develop the technology.
The truck travels a preprogrammed route with no human oversight, using sensors and GPS to navigate around fixed and movable obstacles and communicating data it gathers to a transport system hub. That system is the real thing Volvo seems to be selling. In theory, a commercially viable product wouldn’t be the vehicle itself but a network that controls a fleet of vehicles that work in tandem.
Volvo spokesman Fredrik Klevenfeldt did not respond to a call and email requesting comment.
The announcement comes amid a push, largely by European automakers, to develop autonomous vehicles for commercial use. Last month, the Dutch government held the European Truck Platooning Challenge, a weeklong competition that sent about a dozen semi-autonomous trucks driving across Europe. While companies such as Tesla Motors, Uber and Google have pioneered technology for personal self-driving vehicles, autonomous construction and shipping trucks, as Quartz’s Joon Ian Wong notes, “have been quietly putting the concept to work in a business setting.”
Indeed, there’s a strong business case for adopting fleets of self-driving trucks. Autonomous vehicles travel in a pack -- called a “platoon” -- communicating with each other via WiFi, which allows them to drive closer together at algorithmically calculated speeds. Platooning can slash fuel use by up to 15 percent and prevent accidents caused by human error, according to a study by the research firm TNO.
Autonomous trucks could obviate the need for human participation in one of the world’s most difficult industries. Factors like irregular hours, stress and limited access to healthy food or opportunities to get up and move around all combine to degrade truck drivers’ health. Long-haul truck drivers have greater risks of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and obesity compared to average U.S. workers, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Industry incentives to get cargo to its destination as quickly as possible leave drivers fatigued, turning their big rigs into giant high-speed weapons if they drift off behind the wheel. And in the United States, at least, watered-down regulations only seem to be making things worse.
Mining can be even more disastrous than trucking. Though mining deaths have plummeted in the U.S., in part because mining jobs have decreased, catastrophes periodically capture headlines around the globe. Two years ago, Turkey suffered its worst industrial accident ever when 301 miners in Soma died, some of them burned alive. Last year, a harrowing 2010 Chilean mining disaster was dramatized in a Hollywood movie. Just last week, at least 13 people were killed in an accident at a jade mine in Myanmar.
“It’s a shifting and upgrading of skills; we’re moving from primitive work to advanced work,” Philip Kirchlechner, who spent years in the iron mining industry, told Australia’s ABC last year after a local mining company rolled out about 30 robotic trucks at two of its locations. “By eliminating those mundane, often dangerous jobs, you create safer and more sophisticated jobs.”
In December of 2015, a group of women started to get together over dinners and coffees to talk about diversity in the tech industry.
Over time, they formalized their ideas and on Tuesday launched Project Include, a website aimed at helping executives in the tech sector diversify their workforces. It's essentially a one-stop shop for solutions to the industry's diversity problem.
Eight women, all with impressive tech-related day jobs, signed on to the project. The headline name is Ellen Pao, who has been, willingly or not, a public face of the fight against homogeneity in the tech industry in recent years. She sued the venture capital firm she worked for, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, for gender discrimination in 2012 and lost in a very public trial in 2015. She was also the CEO of Reddit for a brief period in 2014 and 2015, but resigned after the site's users initiated a harassment campaign against her.
Some of Project Include's other members are senior Slack engineer Erica Joy Baker, engineer and startup advisor bethanye McKinney Blount and venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein.
Project Include encourages such teams to think critically about where their company could do better and to focus on the recommendations that apply to them. The site includes a set of 60 or so recommendations for how company management teams can approach diversity.
These recommendations fall into seven categories: defining culture, implementing culture, employee lifecycle (which includes everything from hiring to compensation to promotions), training, resolving conflicts, measuring progress and leading as VCs.
"You can't keep shoving people into companies but not building a culture that helps them be successful," Baker told The Huffington Post. "Our project focuses on all aspects of the diversity and inclusion issues that need to be addressed."
One major Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Chris Sacca, has already expressed interest publicly on Twitter.
@EricaJoy @blackfounders I just filled out the form! Heard about this yesterday from my pal @ekp. And I love @triketora. Whoa team.
— Chris Sacca (@sacca) May 3, 2016
The site's information is based on a combination of the groups's own experiences and available research on how to best avoid things like bias in the workplace. Recommendations that appear on the website offer footnoted links to research supporting each point and include tips like "define and share clear compensation bands" and "write inclusive job descriptions."
Inclusive job descriptions are important, the site notes, because they can communicate to applicants subtle information about who the ideal candidate is. For example, listing perks like ping-pong tables and game rooms give the implication that the target is young, white men. On the other hand, the site says that "including 'salary negotiable' in a job description reduces the gender wage gap by 45 percent."
The goal is to help Silicon Valley better represent the rest of the country.
"At this point there is rigorous research, and rigorous analytics, that point to increased profitability that comes from diversity [at a company]," Kapor Klein told HuffPost.
People often think of Silicon Valley as the closest approximation of a libertarian utopia. It doesn't matter if you graduated college or want to wear sweats to work: If you're smart and work hard, you can succeed.
"If they really believe that, what is keeping them from acting on rigorous data that says they are shooting themselves in the foot?" asked Kapor Klein, who says she would like to see companies get to a place where their workforces reflect the diversity of their customers.
Baker goes even further than Kapor Klein in describing her goals for the project: "There are a lot of companies whose customer bases aren’t very diverse. I would like to see companies reflect their environment," she told HuffPost.
The women behind Project Include say they realize that the tech industry has a unique way of doing things, and it's important to think about diversity in a way that is congruent with the quick-paced, always adapting ethos of the industry.
"We're doing it the way tech does, which is fast and accessible," said Pao.
The website is minimalist and could be read in its entirety in a couple of hours. And in its simplicity, Project Include is also trying to be different.
"You see tech companies now trying to do a lot of things that finance and banking companies did in the '90s," said Baker. "If you don’t learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it."
There are two things that set this new push for diversity apart, says Kapor Klein.
First, America is simply getting less white. That means a more diverse customer base, more diversity (hopefully) in the applicant pool and a relatively easier path to a diverse workforce.
Second, there's been more psychology and management research about how bias works. We have a better understanding of how hidden biases affect everything from hiring to mentorship to promotion. And knowing about these things means being able to invent ways around them.
In that way, Kapor Klein thinks tech can also be a big part of the diversity solution.
(Reuters) - No one won the multi-state Powerball on Wednesday as the jackpot grew to at least $415 million, vaulting it into the top 10 highest U.S. lottery prizes in history, officials said.
The winning numbers from Wednesday's draw were 30, 47, 57, 66, 69 and the Powerball number was 3, lottery officials said.
The Powerball jackpot has grown past $300 million for the first time since January, when three tickets for the game split $1.6 billion, a record for any U.S. lottery.
Seventeen consecutive drawings have produced no winner, lottery officials said.
The odds of winning at Powerball are one in 292 million, which according to statistics experts is equivalent to flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time.
According to the Powerball website, no one matched all six numbers and won the jackpot on Wednesday as the prize reached about $415 million. The amount placed it in the top 10 of U.S. lottery prizes ever, California lottery spokesman Alex Traverso said. The next drawing would be on Saturday.
Powerball is played in 44 states, including California, which is the nation's most populous state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Even as lottery officials gear up for this latest drawing, they are still waiting for one ticket holder to come forward from the record $1.6 billion Powerball drawing in January.
Lottery officials still have no idea who bought the ticket, sold in Chino Hills east of Los Angeles, Traverso said. Under the rules of the game, the holder has a year from the time of the drawing to claim a prize.
The two other winning tickets were sold in Tennessee and Florida, and those winners have come forward.
(Reuters) - No one won the multi-state Powerball on Wednesday as the jackpot grew to at least $415 million, vaulting it into the top 10 highest U.S. lottery prizes in history, officials said.
The winning numbers from Wednesday's draw were 30, 47, 57, 66, 69 and the Powerball number was 3, lottery officials said.
The Powerball jackpot has grown past $300 million for the first time since January, when three tickets for the game split $1.6 billion, a record for any U.S. lottery.
Seventeen consecutive drawings have produced no winner, lottery officials said.
The odds of winning at Powerball are one in 292 million, which according to statistics experts is equivalent to flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time.
According to the Powerball website, no one matched all six numbers and won the jackpot on Wednesday as the prize reached about $415 million. The amount placed it in the top 10 of U.S. lottery prizes ever, California lottery spokesman Alex Traverso said. The next drawing would be on Saturday.
Powerball is played in 44 states, including California, which is the nation's most populous state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Even as lottery officials gear up for this latest drawing, they are still waiting for one ticket holder to come forward from the record $1.6 billion Powerball drawing in January.
Lottery officials still have no idea who bought the ticket, sold in Chino Hills east of Los Angeles, Traverso said. Under the rules of the game, the holder has a year from the time of the drawing to claim a prize.
The two other winning tickets were sold in Tennessee and Florida, and those winners have come forward.
The Obama administration thinks the Department of Education division responsible for overseeing colleges, managing the student debt crisis and policing loan contractors has done such a good job that it secretly reappointed its chief to a new five-year term.
James Runcie, chief operating officer of the department’s Federal Student Aid office, received the reappointment on Dec. 23 from former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, department spokeswoman Dorie Nolt said. It was one of Duncan’s final acts in office before he left the administration at the end of last year. Because Runcie’s term by law has to be between three and five years, he’s likely to outlast the Obama administration and continue into the next one.
But Runcie’s tenure has been marked by a series of notable debacles -- from the collapse of for-profit college chain Corinthian Colleges Inc. amid a wave of allegations it systematically deceived students about their future job prospects to preliminary findings by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that student loan borrowers are routinely mistreated by loan companies Runcie’s division pays and oversees.
Earlier this month, a group of 29 state attorneys general confidentially alleged that one Runcie-overseen contractor, student loan giant Navient Corp., violated state laws banning unfair or abusive practices by paying call center workers based on how quickly they could get struggling borrowers off the phone. Breaking state consumer laws would constitute a violation of Navient’s lucrative contract with Runcie’s division.
At least 1.2 million Americans last year defaulted on federal student loans serviced by Runcie-overseen contractors, federal data show, despite the fact that every one of them was eligible to make monthly payments based on their earnings. More Americans defaulted on the most common type of federal student loan during the final six months of last year than began making payments under White House-promoted income-based repayment plans.
The department didn’t publicize Runcie’s reappointment, unlike his initial hiring in September 2011. Nolt didn’t explain why he was rehired or provide any additional details, despite several requests from The Huffington Post, and Runcie was not made available for an interview. Duncan didn’t respond to messages seeking comment sent to his new employer, Emerson Collective, or the talent group Creative Artists Agency, for which he commands a $40,000 speaking fee. College lobbyists, student advocates and congressional aides active in higher education matters said they weren’t aware of Runcie’s reappointment.
Runcie's division "has made significant strides" in helping borrowers and improving customer service, Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell said in a prepared statement after this story was published. "Even one default is too many, and much work remains. That’s why Jim’s continued leadership -- especially across a period of transition between administrations -- is so crucial."
Yuri Gripas / ReutersPresident Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in 2012. One of Duncan's last acts before leaving office in 2015 was reappointing James Runcie, despite various student loan issues during his tenure.
Runcie helped shepherd the federal government’s transition from the old bank-based federal student loan program to one in which only the government itself lends directly to students and their parents, saving taxpayers billions of dollars. And his division simplified the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, helping millions of students.
Runcie's division "has made significant strides" in helping borrowers and improving customer service, Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell said in a prepared statement after this story was published. "Even one default is too many, and much work remains. That’s why Jim’s continued leadership -- especially across a period of transition between administrations -- is so crucial."
But over the past few years, lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) have joined consumer groups in severely criticizing Runcie’s division for a variety of reasons, from missing contractors' allegedly pervasive abuse of federal student loan borrowers to ignoring claims that some giant for-profit colleges were defrauding students and taxpayers.
Meanwhile, Runcie and his top lieutenants receive lavish bonuses and relatively handsome salaries, with one bonus totaling $75,000 last year, nearly double the top bonus three years earlier, federal records show. The typical Federal Student Aid employee is paid more than $100,000 annually, close to 33 percent more than the typical federal employee.
Lawmakers and student loan experts have also assailed Runcie’s division for fostering a culture that ignores criticism and resists oversight.
Federal Student Aid suffers from “deep-seated culture issues” that don’t prioritize supervision and enforcement, said Suzanne Martindale, a staff attorney at Consumers Union who advises the Education Department on student loan issues. “The department has a long way to go to actually consider students as the people they are supposed to protect, rather than colleges,” she said.
Under Runcie’s watch, the federal consumer bureau sued two giant for-profit college chains alleging they misled students about their success at placing graduates in their fields; hundreds of debtors publicly declared they’d stop making payments on their federal student loans; and government investigators from other agencies routinely slammed Runcie’s division for failing to aid distressed borrowers and protect students, or they unearthed evidence of mistreatment that Runcie’s deputies missed.
David Goldman/APShane Satterfield, a roofer who owes more than $30,000 in debt for an associates degree in computer science, holds his Everest diploma in March 2016. "I graduated in April at the top of my class, with honors," he said. "And I cant get a job paying over $8.50 an hour." Corinthian Colleges operated the Everest chain before it filed for bankruptcy in 2015.
Earlier this year, Runcie conceded that even though his division has long had subpoena power to compel dodgy colleges to turn over documents, “we haven’t leveraged that.”
The Education Department has a “see no evil, hear no evil” philosophy toward its loan contractors, said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
“You are harming the people you are supposed to be helping, and that has to stop,” Foxx told Runcie in November.
Take Federal Student Aid’s relationship with Navient, the nation’s largest student loan company which formerly was known as Sallie Mae. In contrast to the state attorneys general group, and the federal consumer bureau, which already has told Navient it has amassed enough evidence to indicate the company violated federal law, Runcie’s division has gone out of its way to maintain its relationship with the company.
After federal prosecutors in 2014 accused Navient of breaking the law by intentionally overcharging active-duty servicemembers on their federal student loans, Runcie’s division cleared it of wrongdoing. The department’s inspector general later determined that Federal Student Aid’s findings were based on a bogus investigation, and that the Education Department misled the public when it proclaimed the company didn’t cheat troops.
Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesStudents hold placards as they stage a demonstration at the Hunter College, which is a part of New York City University, to protest ballooning student loan debt for higher education and rally for tuition-free public colleges in New York on Nov. 13, 2015. At least 1.2 million Americans defaulted last year on federal student loans.
In that case, Federal Student Aid concluded that Navient committed no wrongdoing without listening to recordings of calls between the company’s customer service representatives and troops who had tried to assert their right to a cheaper loan under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. State attorneys general based their still-confidential allegations against Navient in part on a review of call recordings.
“How many borrowers do they have to hurt before we shut down the gravy train?” Warren said in a heavily shared Facebook post last week in reference to state prosecutors’ allegations against Navient and the company’s contract with the Education Department. “It’s long past time for the department to hold Navient accountable for routinely ignoring the law.”
State prosecutors’ allegations against Navient are inaccurate, Navient spokeswoman Patricia Christel said. “The facts are that Navient has a long public and well-documented record of assisting borrowers to successfully manage their student loans.”
Education Department spokeswoman Kelly Leon said the department “won’t hesitate to take action if any servicer is mistreating loan borrowers.” The department has promised to again revamp its contracts with companies such as Navient -- a 2014 fix was supposed to correct bad behavior -- and increase its scrutiny of colleges and loan contractors.
Even the White House has implored Runcie’s division to do more to help student loan borrowers. “We can and should do much more to give students affordable ways to meet their responsibilities and repay their loans,” Obama wrote in a memorandum last year.
The White House is in a “mad scramble to clean up a years-long mess,” Martindale said.
This story was updated with a comment from Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell.
Many of the largest U.S. investment funds, including pensions, are doing nothing to protect their investors' savings from the financial risks posed by climate change, according to an analysis by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, a nonprofit. At least 117 American funds, with a combined $4.6 trillion in assets, have taken no action to mitigate the risks associated with a warming planet.
“It simply isn’t professional for the funds to do nothing,” Julian Poulter, the group's CEO, told The Huffington Post.
Indeed, there have been warning signs for quite some time that big investors, from a purely financial perspective, need to think hard about fossil fuels. The S&P 500 stock index is up around 50 percent from 10 years ago. Oil stocks over the same period are up just over 1 percent.
And business is arguably only going to get harder. Global financial regulators are starting to work out a standard system for companies to voluntarily disclose climate risks, the governor of the Bank of England has warned insurance companies that they're at risk of being wiped out by climate change, and Saudi Arabia wants to kick its oil habit.
A 2013 report from England's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries found that under business-as-usual policies, resource scarcity associated with a changing climate could stall the global economy and cause pension funds to be unable to pay out benefits.
So what should a prudent pension fund manager do? “There are many ways to skin the climate-risk cat,” Poulter said. Funds can engage with fossil fuel companies and try to push companies to deal with the climate-related risk they face. Or they can choose to screen out companies that haven’t come to grips with that risk. They can invest in renewable energy firms and other companies that will prosper in a low-emissions world. And since the funds we're talking about are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, they could realistically do a little bit of all of the above.
The point of the analysis isn’t to be prescriptive or legalistic in telling pension funds what they should or shouldn’t do. It’s to push them to understand the reality of the climate risk embedded in their investments, and explain to their members -- whose retirements are on the line -- what they are doing (or not), and why.
What Poulter wants is for pension fund managers to realize that they can’t ignore climate change. When oil is at $43 dollars a barrel, the Paris agreement is striving to keep global temperatures from rising and “you’ve the likes of Saudi Arabia selling their main asset because they see an oil-free world,” it’s just not acceptablefor pension funds to act like nothing is happening.
While you, the customers, had your knees pinned against the seat in front of you and were forced to swallow record baggage and booking fees last year, the U.S. airline industry saw profits soar to the very cushiest of highs.
The Department of Transportation reported Monday that 25 U.S. airline companies combined in 2015 for after-tax earnings of $25.6 billion -- a more than threefold increase over the $7.5 billion in profits one year earlier.
Last year's profits, largely driven by a huge drop in the price of jet fuel without much change in what you pay for flying, is the most since at least 1976, when Congress deregulated the airline industry, according to USA Today. The earnings are enough to purchase more than 70 Boeing 747 airliners.
George Rose via Getty Images
It was the sixth straight year of industry profits, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. But the good times have come after years of red ink: The industry lost $27.2 billion in 2005 and $23.7 billion in 2008.
In 2015, total operating revenues dropped slightly to $168.9 billion, from $169.3 billion in 2014, the department said. At $126.9 billion, airline fares accounted for nearly three-fourths of all revenue. Baggage and reservation change fees accounted for $3.8 billion and $3 billion, respectively.
Overshadowing the industry's slight decline in revenues, however, was dramatically lower fuel costs, to $27 billion in 2015 from $43.4 billion the previous year.
Despite their savings, the airlines charged only slightly lower ticket prices during 2015. In the fourth quarter of 2015, the average domestic airline flight dropped to $363 -- the least since 2010, according to the Transportation Department. The airlines' jet fuel windfall has been slow to trickle down the aisle, however, and with new fees, passengers likely aren't paying less.
Melanie Hinton, a spokeswoman for industry trade group Airlines for America, told USA Today that U.S. airlines are "putting every dollar to work for customers, employees and investors."
Others see things far differently.
"Everybody keeps telling us that we’re seeing all these improvements, but nobody’s seeing them," Charles Leocha, a founder of Travelers United, told the newspaper. “New airplanes don’t help us when the planes are bigger with more seats on board and they’re squeezing more people into them."
Last month, the Senate voted down a measure aimed at preventing airlines from further reducing the amount of legroom. At the time, as Politico reported, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) spoke in defense of his amendment, saying, "The great Abraham Lincoln was asked how long a man’s legs should be, and he famously answered, ‘Long enough to reach from the body to the ground.’ If you asked a major airline today how long should a man’s legs be, they’d say, ‘Short enough to miss the tray table.’ That’s not a way to fly.”
But hey, at least the airlines have been kind enough to bring back complimentary cookies and pretzels. Enjoy!
