Jury Declares Elon Musk Is “Non-Liable” For Pedo Guy Tweet

“My faith in humanity is restored,” said Tesla CEO. As of December 17, 2019, Elon Musk has 29,890,270 followers on Twitter. Anything he says there will have a much more significant impact than a private conversation would. This is why calling Vernon Unsworth a “pedo guy” put him in trouble. Unsworth led the rescue efforts… Continue reading Jury Declares Elon Musk Is “Non-Liable” For Pedo Guy Tweet

Tesla updates Model S front seats with thinner design

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Tesla Holiday Gifts Heavily Discounted With EV Items’ Cyber Monday Sale

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Published on November 30th, 2019 |

by Sponsored Content

Tesla Holiday Gifts Heavily Discounted With EV Items’ Cyber Monday Sale

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November 30th, 2019 by Sponsored Content

By Kyle Field

Even though it is still unseasonably warm here in Southern California, the holidays are nearly upon us. For many of us, the holidays are an excuse to purchase celebratory gifts for our loved ones (and ourselves) … and what better things to buy than a few accessories for your EV.

The folks over at EV Items* are kicking the season off with a bang and are starting their Cyber Monday sale early for CleanTechnica readers using code “CleanTechnica.” You can get 25% off all their accessories (while quantities last), free shipping to North America on orders over $50, and a free Tesla-inspired Starman 1.0 or 2.0 air freshener with any order. As a special bonus, there’s also no need to get up before dawn or wait in lengthy lines — just hop online to order.

Here are a few of our must haves from the sale:

Vegan Model S and X Center Console Cubby Drawer: As one of their flagship items, this center console cubby from EV items has a precise fit and dimensions that create a driver-facing product, optimal for single hand use. It may not be obvious, but the center cubby in yours Model S or X is not a perfect rectangle, it’s a bizarre trapezoid that has been matched perfectly with this drawer. The interior lining is a soft, vegan alcantara while the exterior is a black, vegan “leather” (both cruelty-free). The Model S and X cubby drawer is ideal for loose change, sunglasses, keys, and any small items that might need to be accessed at a moments notice. The silver, anodized aluminum handle is very ‘grab-able’, allowing you to open the drawer without looking. The cubby drawer also includes rubber stoppers that are easily installed to ensure the drawer does not fall out of the compartment while in use. They’re bringing back their limited edition cubby with red lining for the holidays, so you’ll want to get one of those before they sell out again!

Just like the Model S/X cubby, the Model 3 storage cubby uses cruelty-free materials with an alcantara interior and a vegan leather exterior. The interior comes in either black or limited edition red. This console storage cubby from EV items is custom made for the center console area of your Model 3 allowing for optimal fit. It’s ideal for storing small items like keys, coins, and sunglasses. It also comes with a removable divider and features a hand-stitched Model 3 badge on the inside. Also, makes for the perfect gift for a Model 3 owner.

It may not get cold and snowy here in Southern California, but for those of you living in places where it does, EV Items has some new mud flaps for the Model 3 that not only keep debris from slingin’ onto your vehicle, they add a nice pop of customization to the car. Model S owners are not to be left out, as EV Items also has a nice set of durable all-weather floor mats for the Model S to keep the debris coming into the car contained.

That beautiful display in the Model 3 was also left bare from the factory, at least for those who couldn’t resist peeling the protective plastic off. EV Items has your back with a tempered glass screen protector for the Model 3 in both clear and matte.

Having sufficient lighting in your Tesla can be challenging, even with the premium interior lighting options. Bring all the brightness of the super bright LED lights to the Model S, X, or 3 with these carefully curated LED lighting kits. LED lighting has been one of my favorite upgrades in my past vehicles because of the noticeable impact to the day to day vehicle experience. The downside of LED lights is that the right sizes can be hard to find and the quality can be questionable when buying from one of the thousands of suppliers hocking their wares on the interwebs. EV Items makes this easy with lighting kits for each Tesla.

If you want to take lighting to the next level, they also have T Logo welcome lights that cast a familiar logo onto the ground as you walk up. In addition to providing a bit of helpful light when approaching the car, they look really sharp at night.

Not sure what to get your loved ones? Here are a few quick and easy sure-fire gifts for the Tesla drivers in your life. The Model 3 Wireless smart phone charger makes docking and charging compatible phones effortless and gives a nice boost of juice when you’re on the go. Model S and Model X owners can pick up some of EV Items’ aluminum key fob covers that give the key fob a nice pop of flair without going overboard.

To take advantage of the early CyberMonday 25% off special, you can visit EVitems website and use the code “CleanTechnica” at checkout!

This article was sponsored by EV Items; all images courtesy of the company and used with permission.
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Sponsored Content CleanTechnica and our parent company, Important Media, occasionally choose to work with select clients for paid promotion on our network sites. This is the account for all paid content. For information about paid outreach, please contact our Accounts Manager Andrea Bertoli.

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Elon Musk Wins in Defamation Suit by British Diver

After less than an hour of deliberation, a Los Angeles jury Friday found that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk did not defame a British diver by calling him a “pedo guy” and “sus,” or suspicious, in a series of July 2018 tweets. In court on Friday, the lawyer for the diver, Vernon Unsworth, had… Continue reading Elon Musk Wins in Defamation Suit by British Diver

Electric Ford Pickup Will Require Much Larger Battery Than Cybertruck

It all comes down to efficiency and that’s where Tesla wins. ARK Invest has done some interesting analysis on the Tesla Cybertruck recently. It says the pickup truck attracted attention in places where the Model 3 didn’t. We got in touch, and we were still waiting for answers when they came out with another one.… Continue reading Electric Ford Pickup Will Require Much Larger Battery Than Cybertruck

Ford program offered rides to doctor’s offices. Why they’re ending it.

CLOSE GoRide’s non-emergency medical transportation offers true on-demand service that is especially useful for those in wheelchairs or who have other special needs.  (Photo: Ford Motor Co.) Ford Motor Co. is no longer offering rides to the doctor’s office. The Dearborn-based automaker said it is pulling the plug on its non-emergency medical transport service called GoRide Health, at… Continue reading Ford program offered rides to doctor’s offices. Why they’re ending it.

No, Machine Learning Does Not Have A Huge Carbon Debt

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Published on November 30th, 2019 |

by Michael Barnard

No, Machine Learning Does Not Have A Huge Carbon Debt

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November 30th, 2019 by Michael Barnard

As part of the CleanTechnica series on the use of machine learning in advancing our low-carbon future, it would be remiss to not point out the carbon debt. However, it’s not as bad as was reported earlier this year, in my estimation.

Let’s talk about the study itself, and the assumptions it made. The paper that made some headlines was Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP by Strubell, Ganesh, and McCallum of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and it was published in June of 2019. Strubell and McCallum are part of the team that built a state-of-the-art natural language processing model, LISA. That stands for linguistically informed self-attention, and as followers of the series will remember, attention is core to machine learning.

Some of the numbers provided for the CO2e emissions were quite large, with one model, an advanced translation model referred to as the Evolved Transformer for neural architecture search, having a calculated carbon debt of 626,155 lbs of CO2e to train and optimize. 300 tons of CO2e is quite a bit, but some context is required, and then a recalculation with likely better assumptions.

As a reminder, neural nets are trained occasionally and often used many times. Taking the Tesla machine learning model, it has over 500,000 cars on the road with its neural net chips, and Tesla’s Autopilot and Autosteer features are used by vastly more people than any competitor. As a result, when thinking about the carbon debt of training neural nets, we have to compare that to the number of times that they are actually executed and for what purpose. Given that each Tesla displaces an internal combustion vehicle and that when using autonomous features the cars are actually more efficient, this is a highly virtuous use of machine learning.

As a different example, an earlier article in the series looked at the CoastalDem machine learning model. That use of machine learning took North American satellite radar coastal elevation data, trained it with ground truth from Lidar, validated it against Australian Lidar, and then ran it for the entire world. The model was executed a few times, but the end result is a static dataset of adjusted coastal elevations which is being referenced around the world for policy and climate action planning. In this instance, the understanding of actual threat from climate change and the multiple reuse of the outputs outweighs the carbon debt.

Not all examples are so beneficial, of course. Recently, an article in the series assessed the Heliogen improvements of focusing concentrated solar power (CSP), and found that while the machine learning portion was interesting and potentially reusable in other domains, the end results were very unlikely to be of any value. Certainly, the purported use cases for its higher heat CSP didn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Let’s look at the assumptions made by the research next. The key one I tested was the paper’s assumption of 0.954 lbs of CO2e per kWh for model training. That’s the US average, and as I looked at that I had a hypothesis that it was likely overstated given where most deep machine learning efforts were being performed.

To that end, I first pulled together the data on current state-by-state CO2e per kWh.

Chart by author from IEA data

As can be seen, the US average conceals a wide variance of potential CO2e debts for compute power. A model which is trained in Washington State on compute resources that are powered off of straight grid electricity would have a tenth of the carbon debt of one trained in Wyoming.

My hypothesis was that many of the models in the report would be California-based. The 0.47 lbs CO2e per kWh that is from California’s grid is only 50% of the carbon debt of the US average.

However, after determining this I then went deeper. I looked at each of the major models with a calculated carbon debt in the paper to see where they were actually trained, assuming that at least one or two would be trained in Google data centers, with Google’s 100% renewable commitment and offsets. The results were substantially at odds with my expectations.

Table by author

These are the models and associated training CO2e burden per the paper. When I dug into the compute resources used, I found that in all but one case they were Google or Azure compute resources used for learning. The 3rd through 6th columns are the variance calculation between what the paper suggested and what was likely accurate. To be clear, the NAS Evolved Transformer model still sees 10 tons of CO2e, which is considerable, but also a tiny fraction of the study’s assertion.

I had performed a rough assessment based on publicly available data earlier this year, What Is The Carbon Debt Of Cloud Computing? My assessment found that of the biggest Cloud providers, Google and Microsoft Azure had the lowest carbon debt by far, having not only a commitment to 100% carbon-neutral electricity that they were working to achieve, but also purchasing high-quality carbon offsets for their operations. That puts the CO2e per kWh down in the 0.033 lb range given the full lifecycle emissions of wind, solar, and hydro. Amazon’s AWS wasn’t as good, but had still achieved 50% renewables for its data centers in 2018, meaning its operations are far below the US average.

The authors of the paper used a different approach to assessing data center loads. They started with a 2017 Greenpeace report on the subject, so it was relatively solid, however it doesn’t cite CO2e per kWh at all, but stays silent. Instead, it reports different mixes of electrical generation actually purchased and provides percentages of those. Unsurprisingly, all the major Cloud providers are buying a lot more low carbon electricity than the average for the grid, but also unsurprisingly, they still have to purchase MWh that have been generated from coal and gas. I won’t quibble with Greenpeace’s methodology, but I do find a substantial variance between the bulk purchasing of renewable electricity by Google and Microsoft and the claims that their data centers run in large part on gas- and coal-generated electricity. I suspect that Google and Microsoft are buying sufficient electricity from renewables for their operations, but Greenpeace isn’t choosing to credit them with it.

But that’s not the largest issue with the assumption made by the paper. That assumption is that since Amazon’s AWS is the most popular Cloud compute platform and its breakdown per Greenpeace was roughly the same as the US breakdown, that the US average was appropriate to use. As can be seen from the resulting assessment in the table above, not one of the models assessed used Amazon, so that’s a bit of a problem with the reliability of their results.

To be clear, I’ve taken an average CO2e for renewables assuming Google and Microsoft have purchased offsets to get them there where they are not directly purchasing renewables, but they also might be purchasing offsets for the low full lifecycle CO2e.

This isn’t to say we should disregard the study.

Chart courtesy openai.com

Open AI — back to Elon Musk again — published an assessment of compute cycles required to train machine learning over the years. What they found is that major advances in machine learning capabilities showed an exponential growth in CPU cycles required, shown as a straight line on this logarithmic chart.

The increase in CPU cycles to advance machine learning has been accompanied by advances in efficiencies of computer technology and lower carbon electricity, but it’s worth paying attention to. It’s only going to increase.

Note: I’ve reached out to the study lead author for comment. Should they get back to me, the article will be updated.
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Michael Barnard is Chief Strategist with TFIE Strategy Inc. He works with startups, existing businesses and investors to identify opportunities for significant bottom line growth and cost takeout in our rapidly transforming world. He is editor of The Future is Electric, a Medium publication. He regularly publishes analyses of low-carbon technology and policy in sites including Newsweek, Slate, Forbes, Huffington Post, Quartz, CleanTechnica and RenewEconomy, and his work is regularly included in textbooks. Third-party articles on his analyses and interviews have been published in dozens of news sites globally and have reached #1 on Reddit Science. Much of his work originates on Quora.com, where Mike has been a Top Writer annually since 2012. He's available for consulting engagements, speaking engagements and Board positions.

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Team Tesla At The Special Olympics Australia

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Published on November 30th, 2019 |

by Johnna Crider

Team Tesla At The Special Olympics Australia

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November 30th, 2019 by Johnna Crider

Spread far and wide over the globe, the Special Olympics is changing the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities. This worldwide movement is one that empowers the human spirit by lifting limitations through inclusiveness. It encourages people to be a part of something bigger than themselves. We may know of the Special Olympics through its work with sporting events, but it is so much more than that. For those who participate, this culture, by creating an atmosphere of inclusivity, enables individuals to play on the same field — both with and without intellectual disabilities. And Team Tesla is now a part of creating that inclusivity.

Model X owner Tesla in the Gong, will be participating in Team Tesla for the second time. Last year, he tells me, Team Tesla came in second place in the overall fundraising campaign. The funds they raised will go to help athletes in the Special Olympics Australia to participate in sports training and competition. Tesla in the Gong’s goal is to raise $10,000 for the Special Olympics. So far, he has raised $1,490. For those who would like to help, you can by donating any amount here. As for the rest of Team Tesla, they have raised so far (at the time of this writing) a total of almost $5,000.

“Car and bike enthusiasts are called upon and each company has its own team,” he tells me. He will also participate as a driver who will pick up an Olympian and take them to the Sydney Motor Park for some trips around the track. He gives them a good ride in the Tesla and the full Tesla experience. This will be his second time being a registered driver to do this. The idea is to treat the Olympians to some fun, and what better way to hit the track than in a Tesla Model X? Tesla will be well represented and this is due to the fact that like its CEO, many members of the Tesla community care about our worldwide community. Tesla itself has a way of bringing people together for the greater good.

2018 Team Tesla — Soar and Roar Festival Special Olympics Australia
Tesla in the Gong and 19 others participated in The Soar and Roar Festival in 2018. This is the festival they will be a part of again this year. It is an annual event hosted by the Special Olympics Australia to raise funds for intellectually disabled athletes. Team Tesla, with 20 vehicles, managed to raise over $13,000 last year.

Tesla Tom uploaded the video above and was one of the drivers in Team Tesla. In the video, Tesla Tom explains that since Team Tesla raised a high amount of funds, they got to win a prize, which was being the leading team of cars in the race at the motor park. In the video description, Tom says, “We had a wonderful day placing many smiles on the faces of our athletes and their careers along with many other unique and luxury car teams.”

Team Tesla is just a small representation of the Tesla community and how active members are around the world when it comes to doing things to benefit our fellow humans, animals, and the planet. The Tesla community is all about doing good things that help.
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Johnna Crider Johnna Crider is a Baton Rouge artist, gem and mineral collector, and Tesla shareholder who believes in Elon Musk and Tesla. Elon Musk advised her in 2018 to “Believe in Good.”

Tesla is one of many good things to believe in. You can find Johnna on Twitter

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Tesla changed the release dates for the most and least expensive versions of the Cybertruck by a year (TSLA)

Tesla has changed the production timelines for the most and least expensive trims of its Cybertruck pickup truck. It said production for the three-motor, all-wheel-drive Cybertruck, which starts at $69,900, would begin in 2021, a year earlier than Tesla first announced. The single-motor, rear-wheel-drive Cybertruck, which starts at $39,900, will enter production in late 2022,… Continue reading Tesla changed the release dates for the most and least expensive versions of the Cybertruck by a year (TSLA)