In February of last year, Governor Walker signed an administrative order to help jumpstart mariculture, or sea farming, in the state. One Juneau couple is whipping up a recipe to make local kelp an enticing business and snack. They’re part of a growing number of startups that see Alaska seaweed as a marketable food.
There’s an aquatic plant that’s become a big part of Matt Kern and Lia Heifetz’s relationship.
Kern and Heifetz are dedicating so much of their time to seaweed because they’ve been laying the groundwork for a new business.
“They were really interested in doing domestic production,” Tamsen Peeples said. She’s employed by Blue Evolution and works on the science of seaweed farming at the University of Alaska Southeast, as a marine biologist.
But one thing Alaska doesn’t have is easy access to kelp seed. The department of fish and game says you can only farm with plants native to the region, and that’s where Peeples’ research comes in. She’s been working on propagating seed from local kelp spores.
The state of Alaska is receiving over $8 million in settlement money after a top car company cheated on its federal emissions tests. Volkswagen sold more than 500,000 diesel-powered cars nationwide between 2009 and 2016. And those cars were equipped with so-called “defeat devices,” or software that masked actual emissions when tested.
The governor’s office has appointed the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA) to help administer the state’s share of the settlement.
“This is just another way to leverage some of that improvement that’s needed in rural Alaska,” Sean Skaling, an energy policy director at AEA, said.
Skaling said the types of projects that can be funded are defined in the settlement, including improving emissions for transit buses, ferries and boats. That could mean replacing diesel engines with fully electric or hybrid ones.
Additionally, the money can also be used to upgrade energy infrastructure in remote villages.
The agency is taking public comments to help prioritize the most effective projects. The final plan is expected to be completed in the fall.
Skaling said this $8 million is different from the Volkswagen buyback program and settlement money that’s being doled out nationwide.
A fake facial recognition app that claimed to be able to identify strangers from a photograph has turned out to be a publicity stunt.
Facezam claimed it could identify people by matching a photo of them with their Facebook profile. It was claimed that all users had to do is take a picture of someone on the street and run it through the app, which will tell them who it thinks the person in the photo is.
After the hoax was revealed to be the work of a viral marketing agency, Facebook said such an app violated its privacy policies.
"People trust us to protect their privacy and keep their information safe. This activity would violate our terms," Facebook said.
Facezam falsely claimed it could scan billions of Facebook profile images a second, through a database for developers, until it found a match. It claimed to be able to link most photos with a profile on the social network within 10 seconds.
"Facezam could be the end of our anonymous societies," said Jack Kenyon, who claimed to have founded Facezam. "Users will be able to identify anyone within a matter of seconds, which means privacy will no longer exist in public society."
Why does that matter? Because Iceland was the one country that defied the global consensus and did not bail out its bankers. True, there was shock to the system. But it was relatively short, and once the pain was dealt with, the country has bounced back stronger than ever.
The crash of 2008 hit every country in the world. And yet none was quite so completely destroyed as Iceland. A tiny country, home to just 323,000 people, with cod fishing and tourism as its two major industries, it deregulated its finance sector and went on a wild lending spree. Its banks started bulking up in a way that might have made Royal Bank of Scotland’s Fred Goodwin start to wonder if his foot wasn’t pressed too hard on the accelerator. When confidence collapsed, those banks were done for.
It was about as bad as the mainstream economic consensus predicted it would be. The banks went down, and the economy went down with them. But there has been a twist in the tail. As it turned out, Iceland recovered relatively quickly.
"There is no difference between the mindsets of Geert Wilders and social democrats in the Netherlands. They all have the same mindset ... That mindset is taking Europe to the cliff. Soon wars of religion may and will start in Europe."
"Shame on the EU," Erdogan said. "Down with your European principles, values and justice ... They started a clash between the cross and the crescent, there is no other explanation."
After years of allowing customers to rank movies on a scale of 1-to-5 stars, the streaming service announced plans to replace that system with a binary “thumbs up vs. thumbs down” rating. Soon one-star ratings will cease to be a thing on Netflix — or five-star ratings, for that matter.
The new Siskel & Ebert-ian system was revealed by Netflix executive Tod Yellin at a press briefing at the company’s headquarters in Los Gatos, California on Thursday, Variety reported and EW confirmed.
Yellin also noted that the review system has been less important over the years as the company has found users will often rank respected documentaries with five stars and more frivolous titles with one star despite being far more likely to actually watch the latter. (It’s true; many popular guilty-pleasure favorites like Armageddon are saddled with one-star averages despite having plenty of fans).
Still, it’s hard not to feel like the new method gives users less information — a four-star average feels rather different than five-star average even though both would receive the same thumbs up.