The Old Reader

08 Jul 03:25

In Its Battle With Big Tech, the CFPB is Building an Army of Engineers

by msmash

An anonymous reader shares a report: One of Rohit Chopra's first moves as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was launching a major investigation into Big Tech payment platforms. Soon after, it put out a call to tech whistleblowers, asking them to report misconduct at fintech companies. Now, the CFPB says it's hiring 25 technologists over the next year to help its staff of mainly economists and lawyers actually probe these new leads. The move is as sure a sign as any that the bureau's ongoing efforts to investigate and hold tech companies accountable for financial wrongdoing are only accelerating. Leading the recruiting push is Erie Meyer, a longtime Chopra aide and the first chief technologist of the CFPB. Meyer previously co-founded the United States Digital Service, the technical team that launched under President Obama after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov. Like USDS, the new tech team at CFPB will recruit technologists from both the private sector and other parts of government for two-year tours of duty. But unlike USDS and its offshoots at the Department of Defense and other agencies, the goal of this team isn't to fix broken government tech, Meyer told Protocol. Instead, it's to help the government cut through tech companies' smoke screens.

Construction Begins On 'Mammoth' Direct Air Capture Plant

by BeauHD

Swiss climate tech company Climeworks announced yesterday that it has broken ground on its biggest facility yet for capturing carbon dioxide from the air. The Verge reports: The new Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant, named Mammoth, will significantly scale up the company's operations in Hellisheioi, Iceland. That's where Climeworks built Orca, which was the largest DAC plant in the world when it came online last September. Orca can capture up to 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, roughly equivalent to how much climate pollution 790 gas-guzzling passenger vehicles release annually. Mammoth, in comparison, can capture about nine times as much CO2 as Orca. There are fewer than 20 such plants in the world, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), and they don't yet have the capacity to make a serious dent in the greenhouse gas emissions humans have dumped into the atmosphere. The IEA says that to do that, the direct air capture industry has to grow to be able to draw down 85 million metric tons of CO2 by the end of the decade. For comparison, it captures just 0.01 million metric tons today. That'll likely require a new generation of DAC plants, each capable of taking in 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year. So in the grand scheme of things, Mammoth -- with the capacity to capture 36,000 tons of CO2 a year -- isn't quite so mammoth. Even so, Mammoth is an important test case for scaling up Direct Air Capture tech.

AI Could Improve Welfare of Farmed Chickens By Listening To Their Squawks

by msmash

Artificial intelligence that could improve the welfare of farmed chickens by eavesdropping on their squawks could become available within five years, researchers say. From a report: The technology, which detects and quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds, correctly distinguished distress calls from other barn noises with 97% accuracy, new research suggests. A similar approach could eventually be used to drive up welfare standards in other farmed animals. Each year, about 25 billion chickens are farmed around the world -- many of them in huge sheds, each housing thousands of birds. One way to assess the welfare of such creatures is to listen to the sounds that they make. "Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call tends to be louder than the others, and is what we would describe as a pure tonal call," said Alan McElligott, an associate professor of animal behaviour and welfare at the City University of Hong Kong. "Even to the untrained ear, it's not too difficult to pick them out." In theory, farmers could use chickens' calls to gauge their level of distress, and enrich their housing where necessary. However, in commercial flocks containing thousands, or tens of thousands of chickens, deploying human observers is impractical. For one thing, their presence could further stress the flock, but with so many birds, objectively quantifying the number of distress calls is impossible, McElligott said.