Category: UNCATEGORIZED

SpaceX held a press conference on Monday to discuss the results of a months-long investigation conducted by itself and NASA into an anomaly that took place during a static fire test in April. The investigation found that the “anomaly” which occurred during the test was the result of oxidizer mixing at very high pressure with the helium component of the SuperDraco rocket engine propellant system.

On April 20, SpaceX held an abort engine test for a prototype of its Crew Dragon vehicle (which had been flow previously for the uncrewed ISS mission). Crew Dragon designed to be the first crew-carrying SpaceX spacecraft, and is underling a number of test to prove its flight-readiness to NASA. The test encountered a failure that was instantly visible after the first few tests proved successful, with an unexpected explosion that produced a plume of fire visible for miles around the testing site at its Landing Zone 1 facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

SpaceX BP of Build & Flight Reliability Hans Koenigsmann and NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Kathy Lueders took members of the media through the results of their joint investigation into the cause of this anomaly. Koenigsmann explained that thanks to identifying burn marks around a check valve in the system that’s meant to separate the oxidizer and fuel components under pressure. These check valves contain a spring which can be opened and allow flow in the direction you want the propellant components to go, but in this case a ‘leaky’ check valve resulted in a ‘slug’ composed of high pressure oxidizer striking a titanium component that resulted in a very violent reaction, hence the explosion.

Both Lueders and Koenigsmann noted that it was in many ways “a gift” that this happened during a ground test, because it mean that there were many high-speed cameras that could capture the incident, and it was relatively easy to comb the site and recover components to best figure out the cause of the anomaly. Koenigsmann also noted that while the team is confident in sharing these results, they are actually only approximately 80 percent the investigation and there is about 20 percent left to do in terms of figuring out additional details, mostly around the physics involved.

Koenigsmann said that SpaceX is already implementing a crucial hardware fix for this, which is to replace the check valve with a burst valve. A burst valve completely separates the oxidizer and fuel from any pressurization liquid, which will mitigate this issue and definitely “make Crew Dragon a safer vehicle,” he said.

So far this year, SpaceX has succeeded in launching an uncrewed version of its Crew Dragon 2 spacecraft to the ISS during a mission in March, and had planned to run the first crewed test mission this July, with a mission duration of two weeks. That definitely won’t occur on that timeline, and now ongoing production of Crew Dragon craft will bump back the designated machines one generation, meaning the intended Crew Dragon 1 craft meant for crewed mission flight is now Test 2, and so on.

Asked repeatedly about timeliness, neither Koenigsmann nor Lueders would offer anything concrete, but both expressed some skepticism about managing a launch by end of year, without dismissing the possibility outright.

“There’s always the chance that we’re gonna fly crew on a SpaceX vehicle this year,” Lueders said, but continued that “right now” NASA is paying attention to all the ongoing testing of various systems and “all those things need to occur before we’re gonna be confident that the system can safely fly our crew.” “I hope it’s this year,” she added.

Koenigsmann noted that this is an issue he’s fairly confident can be addressed in parallel with other things that need to be addressed with Crew Dragon before crewed flight. “I don’t think it’s impossible but it’s getting increasingly difficult, too,” he said, however, when asked directly about a crewed Dragon launch occurring before the end of 2019.

Lueders ended by expression appreciation for SapceX’s openness with NASA and its astronauts throughout this process, and Koenigsmann reinforced the superiority of the burst valve vs. the check valve it’s replacing for this application.

Alan Turing, one of the pioneering figures in modern computing, and also a tragic one in LGBT history, will soon appear on the U.K.’s £50 note. He was selected from a shortlist of scientists and bright minds so distinguished that it must have made the decision rather difficult.

The nomination process for who would appear on the new note was open to the public, with the limitation this time that those nominated were British scientists of some form or another. Hundreds of thousands of votes and nearly a thousand names were submitted, and ultimately the list was winnowed down to the following dozen (well, 14, with two pairs; descriptions taken from the Bank of England’s summary):

• Mary Anning (1799-1847) – a self-taught palaeontologist known around the world for the fossil discoveries she made in her hometown of Lyme Regis.
• Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984) – whose research revolutionised our understanding of the universe’s smallest matter.
• Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) – who drove the discovery of DNA’s structure, a critical breakthrough in our understanding of the biology of life.
• Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) – who made outstanding contributions to our understanding of gravity, space and time.
• William (1738-1822) and Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) – a brother and sister astronomy team devoted to uncovering the secrets of the universe.
• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) – whose research using x-ray crystallography delivered ground-breaking discoveries which shaped modern science and helped save lives.
• Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) and Charles Babbage (1791-1871) – visionaries who imagined the computer age.
• James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) – who made discoveries which laid the foundations for technological innovations which have transformed our way of life.
• Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) – whose incredible talent for numbers helped transform modern mathematics.
• Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) – who uncovered the properties of radiation, revealed the secrets of the atom and laid the foundations for nuclear physics.
• Frederick Sanger (1918-2013) – whose pioneering research laid the foundations for our understanding of genetics.
• Alan Turing (1912-1954) – whose work on early computers, code-breaking achievements and visionary ideas about machine intelligence made him one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century

Some of the best intellectual company conceivable, to be quite honest. Each of these people was enormously influential in their respective field, although as usual some didn’t get the credit they deserved while living.

Turing was of course an example of this. His work on codebreaking during World War II (alongside his many colleagues at Bletchley Park and beyond, naturally) contributed hugely to the Allied war effort by allowing them to secretly read Axis communications thought to be rendered unreadable by the ingenious Enigma system.

Part of that work, and Turing’s papers on general computing theory written at the time, laid the foundation for many of the concepts that underpin computational systems today. The modern computer is a collaboration among many people in many countries over several decades, but Turing was among the vanguard in theory and execution.

Unfortunately, not only was much of his work required to be kept secret for decades afterwards, limiting the knowledge of his accomplishments to a select few, but after the war he was later persecuted by the British government for being a gay man.

Charged with indecent acts, he was subjected to mandatory chemical “treatment” for his sexuality: humiliating and unjust compensation for a man who saved thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and helped create the defining technology of the 20th century in the process. He was found dead in his apartment, having apparently committed suicide, on June 7, 1954.

He was officially pardoned in 2014 after years of consideration and outcry, especially following both the increasing visibility and action of LGBTQIA figures in the present/, and a resurgence of interest in Turing and his collaborators’ contributions to the history of computing and the war effort.

Even with such an extraordinary story, it must have been difficult to pick Turing out from the crowd of luminaries nominated alongside him. You can check out some of the people and thought behind the decision in this video put out by the Bank of England:

The note itself isn’t finalized, but it will resemble the top image. It uses the most famous image of Turing, and will feature notes from his papers and notebooks, a picture of the Automatic Computing Engine (an early digital computer), a quote and signature, and more. Should be a handsome little bill. You’ll see it in circulation starting in 2021.

The unchecked digital land grab for consumers’ personal data that has been going on for more than a decade is coming to an end, and the dominoes have begun to fall when it comes to the regulation of consumer privacy and data security.

We’re witnessing the beginning of a sweeping upheaval in how companies are allowed to obtain, process, manage, use and sell consumer data, and the implications for the digital ad competitive landscape are massive.

On the backdrop of evolving privacy expectations and requirements, we’re seeing the rise of a new class of digital advertising player: consumer-facing apps and commerce platforms. These commerce companies are emerging as the most likely beneficiaries of this new regulatory privacy landscape — and we’re not just talking about e-commerce giants like Amazon.

Traditional commerce companies like eBay, Target and Walmart have publicly spoken about advertising as a major focus area for growth, but even companies like Starbucks and Uber have an edge in consumer data consent and, thus, an edge over incumbent media players in the fight for ad revenues.

Tectonic regulatory shifts

Image via Getty Images / alashi

By now, most executives, investors and entrepreneurs are aware of the growing acronym soup of privacy regulation, the two most prominent ingredients being the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act).

AllBright, the London-based women’s membership club backed by private real estate investment firm Cain International, has raised $18.8 million to expand into the U.S.

The company’s new round was led by Cain International and was designed to take AllBright into three U.S. locations — Los Angeles, New York, and Washington.

The company said that the new facilities would be opening in the coming months.

Coupled with the launch of a new networking application called AllBright Connect and the company’s AllBright Magazine, the women’s networking organization is on a full-on media blitz.

Other investors in the round include Allan Leighton, who serves as the company’s non-executive chairman; Gail Mandel, who acquired Love Home Swap (a company founded by AllBright’s co-founder Debbie Wosskow); Stephanie Daily Smith, a former finance director to Hillary Clinton; and Darren Throop the founder, president and chief executive of Entertainment One.

A spokesperson for the company said that the new financing would value the company at roughly $100 million.

The club’s current members include actors, members of the House of Lords, and other fancy pants, high-falutin folks from the worlds of politics, business, and entertainment.

The club’s first American location will be in West Hollywood, and is slated to open in September 2019. The largest club, in Mayfair has five floors boasts over 12,000 square feet and features rooftop terraces, a dedicated space for coaching and mentoring a small restaurant and bar.

Medical tech and computational pathology startup Paige has published a new article in the peer-reviewed medical journal Nature Medicine, detailing its artificial intelligence-based detection system for identifying prostate cancer, skin cancer and breast cancer, which the company says achieves “near-perfect accuracy.” Paige’s tech, which employs deep learning trained on a dataset of almost 45,000 slide images taken from over 15,000 patients spanning 44 countries, is novel in that it can eschew the need to curate data sets for training first, which greatly decreases cost and time required to build accurate AI-based diagnostic tools.

Last February, Paige announced $25 million in Series A funding, and a partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering Center (MSK) to gain access to one of the largest single repositories of pathology slides in the world. MSK is also home to the lab of Dr. Thomas Fuchs, Paige’s co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, and possibly the world’s foremost authority in computational pathology.

Paige’s approach uses much larger data sets than are typically employed in AI-based diagnostics, but without the tight curation that focuses other efforts much more narrowly on specific types of cancer diagnostics. The result, according to the company, is not only better performance, but also a resulting system that its much more generally applicable.

Next up for Paige is to commercialize its technology, which is something it’s already pursuing. The work described in the article published in Nature Medicine has already been employed in technology currently under review by the FDA, albeit for a different final application than the ones described in the study published by the magazine.

Dish is expanding its hardware lineup today with the launch of a new 4K streaming stick, the AirTV Mini, designed to make it easier for cord cutters to access its live TV service Sling TV, plus Netflix and over-the-air channels from one user interface. The Android TV-powered device is meant to complement an existing setup that already includes an OTA digital antenna and an AirTV WiFi-enabled network tuner, the company says.

For a limited time, new and existing Sling TV customers can get the latter two items for free — an AirTV Wi-Fi-enabled network tuner and an indoor antenna — by prepaying for 3 months of Sling TV’s service.

In addition, the AirTV Mini also includes support for 2×2 802.11AC Wi-Fi, a lost remote finder feature, support for Google Assistant and Google Play, as well as support for VP94K decoding, which allows you to watch YouTube or Netflix content in 4K.

The company has been offering streaming devices for a couple of years. Dish first unveiled its AirTV Player, a 4K media streamer set-top box, at CES 2017. In 2018, it expanded its hardware lineup again to include a new device just called the AirTV,

This year, it expanded its hardware lineup to include a new device, just called the AirTV, a networked TV tuner that streams local programming via Wi-Fi.

Despite the new AirTV Mini’s streaming stick form factor, it’s not meant to compete with rival streaming sticks like the low-cost Amazon Fire TV Stick, Roku streaming stick or Chromecast in terms of price. Instead, it’s a $79.99 alternative to the $119.99 AirTV Player bundle — perhaps for someone who doesn’t care for the sort of Playskool-inspired design of the original streaming box, but still wants over-the-air channels, 4K support, and easy access to Sling TV and Netflix.

The remote for the Mini is improved as well, in a more typical shade of black instead of the AirTV Player’s white and blue design. It’s also a more standard length and width than the stubby and seemingly childish AirTV Player remote. And it still has dedicated buttons for Sling TV, Netflix, and Google Assistant.

Through the remote, users can issue voice commands to control their TV experience. For example, you can use voice search to find favorite shows and movies, or say things like “go to guide,” “show me my DVR” or “rewind 10 seconds.”

“The AirTV brand is committed to making local TV relevant and easily accessible to streamers,” said Mitch Weinraub, director of product development for AirTV, in a statement. “The AirTV Mini is a powerhouse streaming stick with more memory and a faster processor than anything else in the category. When combined with the AirTV network tuner and the Sling TV app, the Mini delivers a superior streaming experience, especially for Slingers who want premium features in a small package at an affordable price.”

The audience for this sort of product — or any AirTV device, for that matter — is fairly niche. While there’s certainly some demand for access to over-the-air programming among cord cutters, there are other solutions that don’t lock you into Sling TV, specifically.

For instance, you can easily switch to your connected antenna from a Roku TV or you could buy the (currently $179.99) Fire TV Recast, which offers a Fire TV interface plus access to stream and record from live TV with its built-in DVR. Neither the AirTV Mini nor the AirTV tuner come bundled with a DVR — you have to provide your own, and plug it into the tuner.

Overall, the solution makes sense for DIY’ers who also subscribe to Sling TV and prefer a Google Assistant-powered experience instead of Alexa.

Private equity firm Blackstone just announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire mobile advertising company Vungle.

The companies aren’t disclosing the financial terms, but as part of the transaction, Vungle has also reached a settlement with founder Zain Jaffer, who filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the company earlier this year.

“As a best-in-class performance marketing platform, Vungle represents a key growth engine for the mobile app ecosystem,” said Blackstone principal Sachin Bavishi in a statement. “Our investment will help deliver on the company’s tremendous growth potential and we look forward to partnering with management to extend Vungle’s strength across mobile gaming and other performance brands.”

Meanwhile, CEO Rick Tallman said the deal will allow the company to “further accelerate Vungle’s mission to be the trusted guide for growth and engagement, transforming how users discover and experience mobile apps.”

Vungle was founded back in 2011, and according to the acquisition release, it’s currently working with 60,000 mobile apps worldwide, serving more than 4 billion video views per month and working with publishers like Rovio, Zynga, Pandora, Microsoft and Scopely.

Jaffer led Vungle as CEO until October 2017, when he was arrested on charges including performing a lewd act upon a child and assault with a deadly weapon. The charges were ultimately dropped, with the San Mateo County District Attorney’s office stating that it “not believe that there was any sexual conduct by Mr. Jaffer that evening,” while “the injuries were the result of Mr. Jaffer being in a state of unconsciousness caused by prescription medication.”

In his lawsuit, Jaffer alleged that after the charges were dropped, “Vungle unfairly and unlawfully sought to destroy my career, blocked my efforts to sell my own shares or transfer shares to family members, and tried to prevent me from purchasing shares in the Company.”

In a statement today, Jaffer said, he is “pleased with the terms of the settlement, which are confidential.” He also commented on the acquisition:

It is extremely gratifying for me to see our early vision, execution and the hard work of so many talented people rewarded like this. From Day 1, Vungle has been at the forefront of the changing advertising landscape. Today, companies of all sizes, and in all industries, are utilizing in-app video ads as an integral part of their customer acquisition strategies.

The acquisition is expected to close later this year. According to Crunchbase, Vungle previously raised more than $25 million from Crosslink Capital, Thomvest Ventures and others.

On the start of Amazon’s biggest sales event of the year, Amazon workers and activists are taking to the streets today in protest of the retail giant. Protests are planned for San Francisco, Minnesota, New York, Seattle and other locations across Europe.

The biggest employee-led one is happening in Shakopee, Minn., where Amazon warehouse workers protesting the working conditions, pay, benefits and general culture.

“These workers, primarily Muslim, East African immigrants, want humane working targets to reduce injuries, full-time instead of temporary working status, and fair opportunities for promotions,” a group of Amazon employees advocating for climate justice wrote on Medium a couple of days ago. “These FC workers reached out to us, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), asking for support.”

This is not the first time warehouse workers in Minnesota have organized. In March, workers went on strike for three hours to call for better working conditions. Last year, those same workers demanded more time for prayer and smaller workloads while fasting during Ramadan.

“Amazon workers are sending a powerful message to Jeff Bezos this Prime Day: It’s time to stop putting profits ahead of people,” United Food and Commercial Workers International Union President Marc Perrone said in a statement today. “With the recent move to one-day Prime shipping, Amazon workers are being forced to meet impossible demands at increasingly unsafe speeds.”

Amazon, however, says its critics are “conjuring misinformation to work in their favor,” an Amazon spokesperson said. Amazon says it already offers the things unions are asking for. Last October, Amazon raised the minimum wage for all warehouse workers to $15 an hour for its U.S.-based workers, but many said that was not enough.

“We can only conclude that the people who plan to attend events today are simply not informed,” the spokesperson said. “As a company, we work hard to provide a safe, quality working environment for the 250,000 hourly employees across Amazon’s U.S. facilities.”

The spokesperson went on to describe how its associates are core to its operators and how they regularly encourage friends and family to apply for roles.

“We encourage anyone to compare our pay, benefits, and workplace to other major employers across the country,” the spokesperson said.

In San Francisco, organizers at Bay Resistance are protesting outside one of Amazon’s offices in the city to demand Amazon end its relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The group is also urging Amazon to stop promoting its facial recognition technology, Rekognition, to law enforcement agencies and ICE.

“As we’ve said many times and continue to believe strongly, companies and government organizations need to use existing and new technology responsibly and lawfully,” the Amazon spokesperson said. “There is clearly a need for more clarity from governments on what is acceptable use of AI and ramifications for its misuse, and we’ve provided a proposed legislative framework for this. We remain eager for the government to provide this additional clarity and legislation, and will continue to offer our ideas and specific suggestions.”

To stand in solidarity with Amazon workers, some activists are asking the masses to boycott Amazon, which means no Amazon.com, Amazon Prime Video, Whole Foods, Kindle, Audible, Book Depository, Twitch, IMDb, AWS, Goodreads and Comixology.

Yet-to-launch streaming media startup Quibi has been keeping up slate announcement at a fever pace, and its latest is a show that sounds potentially relevant to TechCrunch’s audience. The series, which will be created, written, executive produced by and star Reno 911! alum Thomas Lennon, will follow a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who turns away from tech and tries to turn around a different kind of business – a failing California winery and vineyard.

Described by Quibi as a “workplace comedy,” the show will follow lead Lennon’s “rag-tag” team of winery employees, and apparently none of them are very good at this particular task.

Lennon’s track record indicates that this should be worth checking out at least, from his work on the excellent cop workplace comedy Reno 911! to his ongoing roles in Archer, Bob’s Burgers, and Drunk History, he has a strong track record of demonstrating great comedy chops, along with multiple supporting movie roles.

Meanwhile Quibi is really pouring the gas on its series announcements leading up to its target launch date of April 6, 2020. In the last couple of weeks alone, it’s announced a twist on a superhero series directed by Bourne Identity director Doug Liman, a Varsity Blues adaptation series, a WWE-created docuseries focused on women wrestlers and more.