Imagine a future where traffic and car accidents are things of the past, where road infrastructure seamlessly communicates with traffic lights and vehicles. Each in their own way, three visionary Israeli startups are using AI, data and analytics to improve mobility, reduce accidents and digitize the physical world for smarter city management.
While Valerann, NoTraffic and Nexar each offer unique hardware solutions to gather road user data, the real treasure is in the data itself and the AI-driven software that detects, classifies and communicates the trove of information. “Every bottleneck begins with a single car,” said Michael Vardi, Co-founder and CBO of Valerann. “One car slows down and it creates a shockwave, causing massive congestion. By the time road operators realize what’s happening, it’s too late.”
Soon students, faculty, and staff can don Tiger facemasks to help stop spread of COVID-19 Elizabeth Lamark RIT trustee and alumnus Andrew Jacobson donated funds for RIT-branded face coverings for the university community. The face coverings will be distributed beginning the week of Feb. 1. RIT’s Tiger Spirit will soon be felt and seen on campus with the addition of a branded version of the year’s most essential accessory. About 25,000, three-ply cloth face coverings, emblazoned with the RIT logo and a roaring tiger image, will be delivered to all members of the RIT community starting the week of Feb. 1. Students, including those at RIT’s international campuses, will find theirs in campus mailboxes. Face coverings for faculty, staff, trustees, alumni association and foundation board members, and the President’s Roundtable, will be mailed to homes.
The DePaulia
Michael Brzezinski, Chief Film Critic|January 24, 2021
It was always inevitable once this pandemic started that Hollywood was going to try to find some way to spin it into something kitschy from which it could make a profit. It only took weeks after the United States shut everything down in March for an announcement to be made that a thriller based on the Covid-19 pandemic was being filmed under Michael Bay’s Platinum Dune production label.
Now, courtesy of Steven Knight and Doug Liman, we have our second official Covid-19 film, “Locked Down.” The heist rom-com, which released on HBO Max on Jan. 14, stars Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a disgruntled married couple she’s a CEO, he’s an ex-con delivery driver stuck in their townhome as the UK enters lockdown. As they yearn to regain the places they once were, they plan to steal a 3 million euro diamond.
A raft of new US sanctions guidance and designations made 2020 a challenging year for banks involved in trade finance, yet the overall value of financial penalties handed out was low.
GTR speaks to legal experts about recent enforcement trends, the challenges facing trade finance lenders, and the likely impact of the incoming Biden administration.
The total value of settlements and fines paid to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the US’ fearsome sanctions regulator, was US$23.6mn last year – a substantial drop from 2019’s figure of nearly US$1.3bn.
But according to Evelyn Sheehan, a lawyer at Kobre & Kim and a former Department of Justice prosecutor, financial institutions and trading companies should not interpret that as a policy decision to relax enforcement.
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IMAGE: Calcium carbonate samples from a sediment core drilled from the mid-Pacific Mountains show evidence of ocean acidification 127 to 100 million years ago. view more
Credit: Northwestern University
EVANSTON, Ill. Around 120 million years ago, the earth experienced an extreme environmental disruption that choked oxygen from its oceans.
Known as oceanic anoxic event (OAE) 1a, the oxygen-deprived water led to a minor but significant mass extinction that affected the entire globe. During this age in the Early Cretaceous Period, an entire family of sea-dwelling nannoplankton virtually disappeared.
By measuring calcium and strontium isotope abundances in nannoplankton fossils, Northwestern earth scientists have concluded the eruption of the Ontong Java Plateau large igneous province (LIP) directly triggered OAE1a. Roughly the size of Alaska, the Ontong Java LIP erupted for seven million years, making it one of the largest known LIP events ever. During thi