News in Numbers
The number of American states that use one or more election services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to a presentation seen by Reuters. “While it does not handle voting on election day, AWS … now runs state and county election websites, stores voter registration rolls and ballot data, facilitates overseas voting by military personnel and helps provide live election-night results.”
The number of electric vehicle charging stations that will constitute Ford-Amazon’s proposed network. The two companies teamed up to establish the largest charging station network in North American with 12,000 different locations.
Already, 320 people have paid the fee for a near-space-orbit trip aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, which comes with exclusive gold-lined space suits by Under Armour that were unveiled earlier this week. When asked where else she would wear it, one would-be space tourist said, “every Halloween for the rest of my life.”
The remaining number of founding members of Libra, the embattled Facebook-led cryptocurrency effort that now lacks many of the high-profile companies that originally voiced support for the effort. PayPal, an original signatory to the Libra Association charter, announced last week it was withdrawing its support. On Friday, payment giants Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and eBay announced they would no longer be associated with the project followed by the defection of Internet company Booking, which operates sites like Booking.com, OpenTable and Kayak.
The combined quarterly advertising revenues for Google and Facebook, among the few firm numbers available to estimate the value of the Internet. The question has renewed importance as policy-makers — including California Gov. Gavin Newsom — have “proposed creating a ‘data dividend’ that would require large tech companies to pay users for their data, which requires an understanding of how much the data is worth to companies such as Google and Facebook.”
A Dutch company, Urban Crossovers, is piloting an emissions-free aviation fuel. It is a kind of kerosene, made from passing electricity through a mixture of carbon dioxide and water taken from ambient air. Proponents call the potential “limitless” but concede that the capacity of the current plant’s output is only 1,000 liters of the new fuel a day — an amount a jet will consume in five minutes of flying. That in a world with 225,000 flights a day.
An annual car-tab fee that hybrid-vehicle owners in Washington state will begin paying this month to finance electric-car charging stations they will never use. Owners of plug-in electric cars already pay $150 into the state roads fund instead of gasoline taxes, will also pay the $75 electrification fee, for a total $225. The hybrid fee, awkwardly labelled labeled “Hybrid Vehicle Transportation Electrification” on bills from the state Department of Licensing (DOL) was part legislation passed in the last session “intended to promote electric vehicles and reduce carbon emissions.”
The number of daily users of Twitch, a streaming service owned by Amazon that is primarily used for video gaming and was used to live-stream a shooting in Germany on Wednesday.
The height of 500 new telephone poles that will be erected around Denver’s neighborhoods to upgrade the cellular network to 5G, renewing NIMBY concerns among neighbors as the infrastructure for the next generation of wireless services gets built out.
The amount of damages that University of Wisconsin would have received from Apple Inc. had the US Supreme Court not declined to review the lower-court decision on Monday. In 2014, the University had claimed infringement on computer processor technology that, the school claims, were used by Apple without permission.
The investment by Frito-Lay in its Modesto, Calif., plant to reduce carbon footprint using Tesla’s first-ever electric-powered semi-trucks. “The project is funded in part by a $15.4 million grant from the California Air Resources Board, which taps into the statewide cap-and-trade program.”
The height of the Starship spaceship unveiled by SpaceX with promised destination of Mars. The rocket’s first orbital flight may be within months, and missions to space with humans aboard could follow the next year.
In what should be alarming news to urban planners and transportation officials, spending by U.S. households increased 240 percent on taxis and ride hailing but decreased 18 percent on public transit between 2015 and 2018.
Beginning today in Washington, D.C., riders on DC Circulator buses will return to paying the regular $1 fare. Since late February, those rides had been free under a program promoted by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser as a way to help the city’s poor and low-income residents. Critics, including some council members, claimed the “free Circulator disproportionately benefited tourists and people who live and work in some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods.” Council denied Bowser the financial support to make the free rides permanent.
The food delivery company DoorDash said that 4.9 million customers, delivery workers and merchants had their information stolen by hackers. The breach happened on May 4, but the gig economy company says that customers who joined after April 5, 2018, are not affected by the breach. It’s not clear why it took almost five months for DoorDash to detect the breach.
The battery life remaining on a Tesla electric police car during a high-speed chase. A Fremont, Calif., officer in the Tesla Model S, became involved in a police pursuit Friday but radioed dispatch to say that the electric vehicle warned that it had only 6 miles of battery range left and that he may not be able to continue in the chase.
The number of traffic safety bills introduced in state legislatures in 2018, including pedestrian and bicyclist safety (150), automated enforcement (123), alcohol-impaired driving (240), occupant protection (32), drugged driving (2 enacted), and school bus safety (4 enacted).
Percentage of national survey respondents who trust law enforcement and technology companies, respectively, to use facial recognition technologies responsibly.
A group of battery researchers at Dalhousie University, which has an exclusive agreement with Tesla, published findings in The Journal of the Electrochemical Society describing a lithium-ion battery that “should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1 million miles” while losing less than 10 percent of its energy capacity during its lifetime. Its paper seems to affirm a promise made by Elon Musk last April.
The percentage increase since 2012 of the number of registered quarries, rock mining operations and aggregate plants operating in Texas, far outpacing state regulatory oversight.
The value of a 2017 contract for 10 new streetcars canceled by the Seattle Department of Transportation on Monday. The new streetcars were longer and heavier than those the city bought earlier, and would have required up to $17 million in additional work to retrofit maintenance barns, stops and bridges.
The number of online applications received by Amazon in the 24 hours after its six-city career day on Tuesday.
Year Governing was founded by Peter A. Harkness. It will discontinue publication this fall.
The amount of money California is on track to post in licensed cannabis sales this year. This would solidify the state's status as the largest legal marijuana market in the world.
New York City police officers who committed suicide this year. In response, the department is seeking to improve its mental health services.
The number of doctors in California 247 who have had their medical school debt paid off under a new state program aimed at addressing a medical provider shortage. Recipients must agree to see Medicaid patients for 30 percent of their caseloads for five years.
