MIAMI – As emergency responders respond in the following few days after Hurricane Milton, they need to contend with many hazards from the damage along the Gulf Coast – downed power lines, unstable ruins, leaking natural gas tanks and pipes, chemical spills and more.

There's one other growing concern unique to coastal Florida and other hurricane zones – the spontaneous combustion of electrical vehicles inundated by the salty storm surge.

Not every electric vehicle inundated by a storm surge will burst into flames, however it's so common that insurers, automakers, fire chiefs and politicians have warned all electric vehicle owners concerning the expected devastation from Hurricane Milton. And it's not only cars which are a priority.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida's chief financial officer and state fire marshal, issued an announcement Monday detailing a series of fires following Hurricane Helene, which flooded much of the Gulf Coast just two weeks ago. The state found 50,000 electric and hybrid vehicle registrations in the trail of Hurricane Milton's storm surge and counted at the least 64 Lithium battery burns after Hurricane Helene. 17 of those were electric vehicles, the remaining were devices akin to scooters, hoverboards and golf carts. A fireplace was even began by an electrical wheelchair.

Geico, a serious auto insurer in Florida, sent an email Wednesday quoting Patronis' statement to its policyholders warning them of the threat posed by electric vehicles and suggesting looking for protected parking spaces. Tesla also sent a push notification to the cars warning owners to maneuver to higher ground.

The threat of difficult-to-extinguish lithium battery fires could worsen damage to homes and buildings after floods, he said.

“I guarantee you the average person doesn't realize they have saltwater flooding liability in their home,” Patronis said in an interview with the Miami Herald on Wednesday. He called flooded lithium-ion batteries “ticking time bombs” that would cause worse damage than the storms that damaged them.

Social media has captured plenty of electric vehicle fires over time. In a recent one viral surveillance video Posted by Pinellas County, a Tesla swamped by Helene's storm surge burns loudly before catching fire and filling a house's garage with smoke in lower than a minute. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor also said in a news conference that a house is planned for the Davis Islands burned down Also to Helene because of a fireplace in an electrical vehicle.

“Water and the ion batteries don’t mix and they literally explode,” she said.

That's the fundamental problem: salt water conducts electricity. If it gets into sealed lithium-ion batteries utilized in cars and lots of other devices, it could actually cause a brief circuit, causing heat and possibly a fireplace. The effect is analogous to unintentionally touching each terminals of a automotive battery with a wrench – sparks fly.

Fires which are tougher to place out

Lithium battery fires following saltwater flooding aren’t a brand new concern. The first reported fires in electric vehicles occurred back in October 2012 after Hurricane Sandy. But as an increasing number of drivers switch to electric cars, there are an increasing number of of them. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that in Hurricane Ian in 2022, between 3,000 and 5,000 electric vehicles were affected by the storm, with 600 total losses 36 catch fire.

Tesla's vehicle guidelines on its website state that the vehicle can’t be submerged in water and that if it ever happens, it must remain at the least 15 meters away from buildings until a mechanic can have a look at it. For some electric vehicles with water damage, a mechanic can remove the battery and dry it. An associate professor on the University of South Florida can also be working on it Development of a battery This would prevent fires after the hurricane.

Andrew Klock, who oversees EV training programs for first responders on the National Fire Protection Association, said battery fires are rare but firefighters have to know take care of them.

“Firefighters had 100 years to figure out how to put out a fire in a gasoline car. They can delete that very efficiently,” said Klock. “On the other hand, once a battery has been started, it is not so easy to discharge.”

When this happens, it could actually be difficult to regulate a fireplace. Common methods of putting out a fireplace like a blanket don't work, and because the battery is encased in steel, it takes some time for the outer box to chill down.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said battery fires can occur weeks after electric cars are submerged in salt water and that extinguishing the fireplace could take hours and use between 3,000 and eight,000 gallons of water.

Patronis said he has seen the challenge firsthand. After Hurricane Ian two years ago, an electrical vehicle caught fire in Collier County and a fireplace truck used all of the water in 10 minutes to place it out. They ran a fireplace hose on the automotive for an additional hour to place out the flame, after which at 6 p.m. it reignited, he said.

It's essential to notice that, except for damage from saltwater flooding, electric vehicles actually pose a much lower risk of catching fire than gasoline vehicles. Data from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board shows that for each 100,000 electric vehicles sold, there are about 25 fires. In comparison, there are around 1,530 fires for each 100,000 petrol vehicles sold.

Patronis emphasized that he will not be suggesting that electric vehicles pose risks when used recurrently.

“It's a fantastic technology and won't be a problem in Atlanta, Oklahoma or Dallas,” Patronis said. “It’s a saltwater problem for storm surge areas. I was always afraid of Tampa Bay.”

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©2024 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Originally published: October 11, 2024 at 10:57 am

Huge amounts of cash are being poured into generative artificial intelligence, a technology from the San Francisco Bay Area that has taken the world by storm. But the relentless hype is making a bubble that experts say is bound to burst. So far, the price-performance ratio has been modest, while there are various serious problems.

It was lower than two years ago that San Francisco-based OpenAI released its generative AI bot ChatGPT, sparking an arms race amongst major tech firms, a flood of enterprise capital for AI startups, and a growing variety of firms trying to cut costs and increase productivity by integrating the technology into virtually every product and repair possible.

Investors have greater than 24 billion US dollars in generative AI, in response to consulting giant EY, and technology firms plan to spend $1 trillion Goldman Sachs predicts that the approaching years will see an enormous change in AI infrastructure. Many engineers see great potential within the technology, which uses patterns and relationships in data to generate text, images and sounds, but others see critical shortcomings in it.

“Everyone wants to make money in the AI ​​race,” says San Jose-based Howard Young, who integrates AI software into computer systems at tech giant AAEON to enhance urban infrastructure, industrial processes, manufacturing and medicine. Young was on the Reuters Momentum AI conference in San Jose this month together with a whole lot of other engineers and executives. “I'm not seeing the real, organic revenue yet,” Young says. “Even with the best minds in Silicon Valley, it's going to take some time.”

People within the technology industry are “significantly overestimating” the present capabilities of generative AI, and it stays questionable to what extent it’s going to improve, says Jim Covello, chief equity analyst at Goldman Sachs.

“The technology is nowhere near where it needs to be to be useful,” Covello said in a generative AI newsletter from the bank in June. “If AI technology ends up having fewer use cases and lower adoption than is currently widely expected, it's hard to imagine that this won't be problematic for many companies investing in the technology today.”

David Cahn, a partner at Silicon Valley enterprise capital giant Sequoia, identified in a June blog post that there’s a “speculative frenzy” surrounding generative AI that’s resulting in an “illusion” emanating from Silicon Valley that “we can all get rich quick.”

Generative AI, known in tech circles as “GenAI,” is certainly a bubble that's about to burst, and damage is looming — but that's nothing recent for Silicon Valley, says Steve Blank, an associate professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. Blank compared the technology to the bubbling birth of the World Wide Web and the dot-com crash that followed.

“It wasn't that we were wrong about the web, it just took several iterations and restructuring to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Blank said.

For Bay Area startups, it's not removed from the reality once they say, “You won't get funding if you don't have AI in your title or your story,” Blank said. “That's crazy. That giant sucking sound you hear is all the lemmings spending money on the next big thing. One or two of them will strike gold. The rest will lose their shirts.”

The inevitable bursting of that bubble might be less damaging than the implosion of the dot-com bubble, “simply because many companies spending money today are better capitalized than the companies back then,” says Goldman Sachs' Covello.

The transformation within the business world that was touted with huge investments in generative AI has not happened. The expensive technology is essentially unable to unravel complex problems that may enable comprehensive automation of tasks and jobs.

Meanwhile, the technology continues to be suffering from problems which are either growing pains or fundamental flaws, depending on who's talking. The key developers of generative AI are battling in court against artists, photographers, authors, programmers, music labels and newspapers – including this one – for allegedly stealing copyrighted material by crawling the web to “train” AI models.

The training and deployment of generative AI has upended Google and Microsoft's progress toward meeting their climate and sustainability goals. Both firms reported dramatic increases of their electricity and water usage last yr from AI-related data processing and storage. Chatbots and generative search proceed to supply errors and falsehoods. Propagandists use the technology to spread disinformation, students use it to cheat, and evildoers use it for scams and bullying. State legislatures introduced nearly 200 bills to oversee and regulate AI last yr.

Nevertheless, those that imagine within the promise of generative AI are convinced that almost all challenges might be overcome through innovation, they usually point to essential early deployments and powerful potential applications.

“The industry is just emerging,” said Blank. “The earth is still molten. We are beginning to see the outlines of the continents.”

“Right now, it's just starting to rise,” Leong said. “When it can walk and run, I think we'll be overwhelmed by the impact.”

Shomit Ghose, a UC Berkeley lecturer and enterprise capitalist, identified that generative AI has been used to develop a drug currently being tested on humans that’s getting used to treat a lung disease that may result in cancer. The technology can be starting to hurry up weather forecasting. Ghose believes an excessive amount of goes into the AI ​​technologies that underpin generators like ChatGPT and too little into other kinds of generative AI which are starting to revolutionize science.

Energy firms are already using this technology to Making power grids more efficientand integrate wind and solar energy with maximum impact, in response to the International Energy Agency.

Shobie Ramakrishnan, chief digital and technology officer at pharmaceutical giant GSK, told attendees on the Momentum AI conference that the corporate was capable of increase production of its shingles vaccine by a million doses by utilizing generative artificial intelligence to create “digital twins” that replicate factory operations using software.

“It’s a technology,” Ramakrishnan said, “that is both underrated and overrated.”

Originally published: July 28, 2024 at 6:21 am

President Joe Biden’s temporary incoherent debate performance against Donald Trump in June growing pressure from donors, some democratic politicians And Voters for Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

But Biden, in an ABC News interview On July 5, 2024, he questioned whether people were actually demanding his resignation and brushed aside growing concerns about his ability to defeat Trump within the election.

“I don't think anyone is better qualified to be president or to win this race than I am,” Biden told moderator George Stephanopoulos.

While Biden's press conference After the NATO summit on 11 July, he reiterated his determination to remain within the race and said – despite Evidence of negative polls for him in vital swing states and amongst likely voters – that he had seen no indication that he couldn’t win the election.

Biden's Rejection of some political polls and the concerns of a majority of Democratic voters about his candidacy raise the query of whether he’s unaware of the challenges he faces within the campaign or whether he’s ignoring the views and desires of others.

Presidents must depend on advisers and staff to assist them sift through the overwhelming amount of data available and deliver relevant insights at the correct time.

Sometimes this close relationship results in a sort of “presidential bubble,” that’s, an isolated relationship between the president and his staff, advisers, and possibly his family.

Biden will not be the primary president to be criticized Living in a bubble with an echo chamber of yes-men. Harry Truman once described the White House as “big white prison.”

Life within the bubble

The presidency of Ronald Reagan is an example of how living in a presidential bubble has each positive and negative effects. During Reagan’s first term, his closest advisers – James Baker, Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese – known as “The Troika.” These three men often disagreed, but openly discussed policies and options with Reagan and compelled him to make decisions based on different perspectives.

During Reagan's second term, these advisers left office and took on other assignments. Instead, Reagan began to depend on his chief of staff, Don Regan, as his closest adviser. Regan was a really aggressive chief of staff who tightly controlled the knowledge given to the president. In the late Nineteen Eighties, the Tower Commission – a presidential commission to analyze how the federal government secretly sold weapons to Iran without congressional approval – blamed Regan for what was described as Iran-Contra affairThe Commission concluded that Regan President with bad advicewhich led to the scandal.

During former President George HW Bush's administration within the late Nineteen Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties, he realized that his chief of staff, John Sununu, was also making a bubble around him. Sununu desired to be Bush's primary source of data and made it unimaginable for people he didn’t approve of to fulfill with Bush.

Bush became suspicious of Sununu’s activities and opened a Mailbox in Kennebunkport, Maine, within the early Nineteen Nineties. Bush instructed cabinet members, aides and others to send him information there in the event that they suspected Sununu was not sharing it. Bush's suspicion was finally confirmedand he fired Sununu in December 1991.

Former President Donald Trump also deliberately created a presidential bubble of advisers and allies to only positive feedbackIt became widely known that Trump watched the news program “Fox & Friends.” The program’s coverage began to focus positively on him, in a attempt to get his attention – and encourage him to act otherwise, equivalent to participation within the Republican primary debate in 2023.

There are other examples of the results of the presidential bubble.

Former President Barack Obama, for instance, tried to avoid being stuck within the bubble by refusing to offer up his personal BlackBerry, which he viewed as a vital lifeline for direct contact with friends. He was finally allowed to maintain italthough some security restrictions apply.

Distinguishing truth from fiction

Presidential bubbles inevitably form. Presidents live and work in Washington, but cannot walk the streets freely as just one other face in the gang. They must depend on others to get a feel for the general public mood.

Presidents depend on information from the media and on their staff to investigate it and switch it into coherent feedback. But these staff's job security often will depend on pleasing their boss, which might cause them to present information in a positive light. Presidents should be smart enough to tell apart the reality from the facade.

When former President Bill Clinton took office, appointed Mack McLartyhis friend since kindergarten as chief of staff because he knew that he can be brutally honest if mandatory.

Others, like Reagan, were led to disaster, while George HW Bush was sensible enough to mitigate isolation. Some, like Trump, enjoy the bubble since it provides a distorted but seemingly blissful reality.

Presidents have the privilege of getting more information on certain issues than the general public and may due to this fact gain deeper insights than the general public receives.

But in the event that they ignore the views of the common citizen, they achieve this at their peril. Voters within the US have a big selection of opinions and viewpoints. The assumption that White House or Washington DC insiders reflect the views of your complete country adds to the frustration of a president not listening to the people.

Biden has been in public service since 1972. I imagine his service to the country, within the Senate and in the chief branch, can’t be quickly or easily diminished.

But I believe the president needs to contemplate whether he remains to be serving the general public. Is the recommendation presidents receive from their friends, family and staff coloured by their very own ambitions and desire for continuity? Does Biden serve the general public higher by making way for an additional candidate or by becoming the official Democratic presidential nominee?

Such decisions are never easy, but on this case they must be weighed against his own abilities, the views of his staff and likewise the views of the general public. I believe that democratic and democratically oriented voters should be a part of the method and not only be expected to go together with it without having a say.