Tag: massachusetts

Uber fined $8.9 million for hiring drivers with criminal records

Uber has notorious issues when it comes to its background checks for its drivers. The company has missed (or outright ignored) criminal records in the past; earlier this year, over 8, 000 Uber and Lyft drivers failed a Massachusetts background check . It appears that these issues haven’t improved much; this week, Colorado regulators fined Uber for allowing 57 people with criminal offenses to drive for the company. The penalty totals $8.9 million, reports the Denver Post . Back in 2014, the San Francisco and Los Angeles District Attorneys offices sued Uber for misleading consumers by claiming that the company conducts thorough background checks of its drivers . The company has gotten in hot water countless times due to its lax approach when it comes to this issue. The organization in charge of the Colorado investigation, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), determined that Uber had the necessary background information on these drivers, yet chose to do nothing. Instead, the drivers should have been disqualified. The investigation started because the police department in Vail referred a case to the PUC in which an Uber driver dragged a passenger out of the car and kicked him in the face. The PUC then asked Uber and Lyft for all records of drivers accused, arrested or convicted of any crimes that would prevent them from being accepted as a driver. Lyft provided 15–20 records; there were no problems there. Uber provided 107 records of drivers that had been removed from its system; when the PUC cross-checked the names, they found multiple aliases for 57 of the drivers with criminal records. The fine based on $2, 500 per driver per day they were working for Uber. The real issue here is that these drivers with criminal background checks (the PUC set aside people who only had drivers license issues) are being entrusted to drive passengers around. These kinds of problems are putting passengers in danger, and it’s well past time that Uber did something about it. Source: Denver Post

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Uber fined $8.9 million for hiring drivers with criminal records

New Law Bans California Employers From Asking Applicants Their Prior Salary

An anonymous reader shares a report: California employers can no longer ask job applicants about their prior salary and — if applicants ask — must give them a pay range for the job they are seeking, under a new state law that takes effect Jan. 1. AB168, signed Thursday by Gov. Jerry Brown, applies to all public- and private-sector California employers of any size. The goal is to narrow the gender wage gap. If a woman is paid less than a man doing the same job and a new employer bases her pay on her prior salary, gender discrimination can be perpetuated, the bill’s backers say. Last year, the state passed a weaker law that said prior compensation, by itself, cannot justify any disparity in compensation. The new bill goes further by prohibiting employers, “orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, ” from asking about an applicant’s previous pay. However, if the applicant “voluntarily and without prompting” provides this information, the employer may use it “in determining the salary for that applicant.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Law Bans California Employers From Asking Applicants Their Prior Salary

Over 8,000 Uber, Lyft drivers fail new Massachusetts background check

More than 8, 000 Uber and Lyft drivers have been denied licenses to operate in Massachusetts under a new, stricter state background check law , according to the Boston Globe . The most common reason? Issues with the driver’s license status, including suspensions. Under the new law, which went into effect in January, drivers for ride-hailing companies must undergo a two-part background check, one from the companies and one by the state. Out of 70, 789 applicants, 8.206 drivers were rejected, according to a state review. Hundreds were turned down because they had serious crimes on their record, including violent or sexual offenses. Others had drunk or reckless driving offenses. 51 applications came from alleged sex offenders. Uber has faced criticism in the past over its handling of background checks. District attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco filed a civil suit against the company in 2014, claiming it failed to unearth the criminal records of 25 drivers in those areas. But, both Uber and Lyft point out that the Massachusetts background check delves much deeper into a person’s history than theirs do, which is unfair to drivers who are trying to turn their lives around. “Under Massachusetts law, Lyft’s commercial background check provider, like all consumer reporting agencies, is legally prevented from looking back further than seven years into driver applicants’ histories, ” Lyft told the Boston Globe in a statement. “The state does not face the same limitation, which likely explains why a small percentage of our drivers failed the state’s background check while passing ours.” “Thousands of people in Massachusetts have lost access to economic opportunities as a result of a screening that includes an unfair and unjust indefinite lookback period, ” Uber said in its own statement. “We have an opportunity to repair the current system in the rules process so that people who deserve to work are not denied the opportunity.” Massachusetts is hardly the first state to push back against ride-hailing companies. Now that Uber and Lyft are becoming ubiquitous across the country, and with self-driving cars on the horizon, over 30 states have passed regulations to tackle some of the companies’ thornier issues. Via: Cnet Source: Boston Globe

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Over 8,000 Uber, Lyft drivers fail new Massachusetts background check

Uber’s Settlement to Keep Drivers as Contractors Could Save It as Much as $750 Million

Last month, Uber settled two class-action lawsuits for $84 million to keep its California and Massachusetts drivers as contractors. Now, court papers reveal that the ride-hailing company could owe those workers as much as $750 million more if they were classified as employees. Read more…

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Uber’s Settlement to Keep Drivers as Contractors Could Save It as Much as $750 Million

MIT mapped where Boston’s biggest energy hogs reside

Boston might be best known for the longstanding baseball rivalry between its Red Sox and the New York Yankees, but maybe the nerdier folks among us will think of it beyond Fallout 4 and PAX East now. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a model for estimating gas and electricity demand for every building in the city. Some 100, 000 edifices are included and the model is even being used to aid in making decisions regarding energy policy, according to PhysOrg . The idea here is to use the model as a way of making Beantown more energy efficient across the board. “Every city has long-term goals, but nobody knows exactly how to plan for and measure them, ” MIT’s Carlos Cerezo says. “With this model, the city has a map to help them target and reach those goals.” One example of that is looking a building that’s consuming lots of energy (and thus giving off a sizable amount of heat waste) and positioning others around it that’d use the otherwise wasted heat, Cerezo says. Another is developing autonomous power grids, “microgrids, ” that can withstand extreme weather conditions on their own if disconnected from the larger power network. Once a city can see how energy ebbs and flows via the big data , this sort of stuff should become easier. “Nobody has ever modeled a city the size of Boston at this level of detail, ” Christoph Reinhart, also of MIT, says. But the above model’s projections need to be validated against hard, real-world data before the team can reach its ultimate goal of energy-use models for every city on the globe. Source: PhysOrg

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MIT mapped where Boston’s biggest energy hogs reside

MIT’s newest 3D printer spouts 10 materials at a time

One of the biggest hindrances to current 3D printers is that they almost exclusively stick to a single precursor be it plastic, metal or glass . At most, you can get one that extrudes three materials at a time and they’re going set you back a quarter of a million dollars . However, a team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ( CSAIL ) have debuted a novel solution that allows users to create more complex items in a fraction of the time and cost by printing up to ten different materials simultaneously. Dubbed the MultiFab, this machine doesn’t extrude materials. Instead, it mixes microscopic droplets of photopolymers together and shoots them through inkjet-style printers. The system is also quite complex despite being constructed primarily from off-the-shelf components. A central computer directs the printer while receiving a continual stream of data from a 40-micron resolution 3D scanner and camera array as the item is being created. This feedback data — which measures in the dozens of gigabytes — allows the machine to correct and re-calibrate itself as the item is being printed. It also allows the user to place other objects, say a CPU chip, into the project and then print around it. The team envisions users being able to place a cellphone in the machine and 3D-print a case directly onto it. “The platform opens up new possibilities for manufacturing, giving researchers and hobbyists alike the power to create objects that have previously been difficult or even impossible to print.”says Javier Ramos, CSAIL research engineer at CSAIL co-author of the paper. The team believes that the technology could easily be scaled for use in commercial and hobbyist applications alike. Filed under: Science Comments Via: Popular Science Source: MIT Tags: 3D, 3D printing, 3D scanner, camera, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, MultiFab, scanner

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MIT’s newest 3D printer spouts 10 materials at a time

Researchers inject oil into cells and create little lasers

The Massachusetts General Hospital research team that lit up human cells with the help of jellyfish genes a few years ago are back with a more advanced version of the technology. This new version forgoes the complicated external mirror setup in favor of injectable oil droplets impregnated with fluorescent dye. This is the same basic idea as what a team from St Andrews University recently created, except that the plastic bead that served as the their laser’s resonating chamber is now an oil droplet. While the technology isn’t ready for therapeutic applications just yet, it does hold a great deal of promise. The problem with conventional cellular markers and dye is that they have a broad emission spectrum which can make it difficult to spot the marked cells amidst the rest of the tissue. But with these miniature lasers, doctors will be able to mark and track individual cells no matter where they are in the body. The team recently published their findings in Nature Photonics . a dye-impregnated fat cell – Massachusetts General Hospital [Image Credit: Top – Arbi Babakhanians, inline: Matjaž Humar/Seok Hyun Yun] Filed under: Science Comments Source: Nature Photonics

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Researchers inject oil into cells and create little lasers

The Fantastic Vintage Wrist Gadgets That Came Way Before the Smartwatch

Humans have been putting technology on their wrists for a long time—and not just to tell the time. The Apple Watch is just the latest in a long line of wrist-borne devices, so here’s a brief history of watches that were smart for their time, too. Read more…

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The Fantastic Vintage Wrist Gadgets That Came Way Before the Smartwatch

Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras

An anonymous reader writes: Have you enjoyed reading the constant flow of news about how red light cameras are failing? They’ve been installed under the shadow of corruption, they don’t increase safety, and major cities are dropping them. Well, the good news is that red-light cameras are on the decline in the U.S. The bad news is that speeding cameras are on the rise. From the article: “The number of U.S. communities using red-light cameras has fallen 13 percent, to 469, since the end of 2012, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit scientific and educational organization funded by the insurance industry. That includes the 24 towns in New Jersey that participated in a pilot program that ended this month with no pending legislation to revive it. Meanwhile, the institute estimates that 137 communities use speed cameras, up from 115 at the end of 2011.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Out With the Red-Light Cameras, In With the Speeding Cameras