Latest news with #Heidel
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Yahoo
Winter Haven Regional Airport to use digital remote tower system to enhance safety, first in nation
The Brief Winter Haven Regional Airport is looking for ways to enhance safety and efficiency. The airport currently shares a frequency with five other airports. City officials are pushing the FAA for a dedicated frequency. WINTER HAVEN, Fla. - As the Winter Haven Regional Airport gets busier and busier every year, the airport is looking for new and inventive ways to enhance safety and efficiency. The airport is home to multiple flight schools and has experienced explosive growth. By the numbers "Two years ago, we were averaging 55,000 to 60,000 flight operations a year," said Airport Director, Troy Heidel. "We're now averaging 80,000 operations a year." The airport currently shares a frequency with five other airports, so city officials are pushing the FAA for a dedicated frequency since they account for 40 percent of the traffic on the channel. "Pilots for several different airports call their position in the pattern. It can create confusion," said Heidel. 'Was he on final for Winter Haven or Apopka?' So having that dedicated frequency can eliminate some of that confusion." A midair collision in 2023 between a fixed-wing plane and a seaplane claimed four lives, including a student pilot and instructor. It's a tragic reminder of the risks posed by congested airspace. Dig deeper By the end of this year, Winter Haven will have a digital remote tower system with a 360-degree camera and sensor array that can automatically detect and predict air traffic. The tower, which will begin with a testing phase, will be operated remotely from 10 miles away at the Bartow Airport. "Polk County will be the first example of where a remote digital tower at one airport is provided to another airport," said Jake Polumbo with the airport's Safety Committee. "When you have somebody on the ground and their dedicated purpose is to do nothing but guide and direct traffic, it really helps eliminate the variables in the airspace and give that people a single focus and gives them some direction to fly the sky," said Heidel. What's next The remote tower system is fully funded by a more than $1 million Florida Department of Transportation grant. The Source FOX 13 journalist Carla Bayron gathered the information for this story. STAY CONNECTED WITH FOX 13 TAMPA: Download the FOX Local app for your smart TV Download FOX Local mobile app: Apple | Android Download the FOX 13 News app for breaking news alerts, latest headlines Download the SkyTower Radar app Sign up for FOX 13's daily newsletter Follow FOX 13 on YouTube
Axios
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
One of the nation's last drive-ins is just 30 minutes from Richmond
John Heidel didn't set out in life to run a drive-in theater. Why it matters: Now he owns one of the few hundred still around nationwide, just 30 minutes west of Richmond. The big picture: The idea for the Goochland Drive-In, which is only weeks into the 2025 season, began 16 years ago — when all Heidel and his wife wanted to do was go to the movies with their two young children, and stay through the full showing. That, he tells Axios, was impossible. The family would grab tickets for a show at Regal Short Pump, their go-to theater, and inevitably, one parent would spend most of the film in the parking lot with their youngest. So he decided to open a retro, family-friendly movie option: a drive-in, which most banks he talked to did not think was a sound business idea. But he persevered, and in 2009, the drive-in opened to a sold-out crowd. Zoom in: The Goochland Drive-in sits midway between Richmond and Charlottesville and shows movies Friday and Saturday nights when kids are in school (then has expanded hours for when they're not). Today, it boasts two screens: the main one, which is a traditional drive-in set up, and a smaller screen on "The Grove," where families or couples can watch on the lawn. The flicks are usually first-run, like "Minecraft" and "Snow White" or fun-themed nights, like an all-night Monster Movie Marathon around Halloween. The drive-in is designed with families in mind, Heidel tells Axios. To him, that means offering extras, like a kids playground and being pet-friendly. Affordability is also key, which is why the drive-in is priced by the car-load, or $30 for up to seven people. The food menu is known for being budget and family-friendly. Most items are $5 or less, sodas top out at $3 with refills available for $1, and there are vegan and gluten-free options. "It's not quite as cheap as a Costco hot dog, but we try to keep things priced low," he tells Axios. If you go: Both screens are having special double features this weekend, including "Minecraft" and "The King of Kings." That's two movies for the price of one.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Mainz reward Bo Henriksen with new deal: 'A motivational genius!'
The colourful character who led Mainz 05 away from the relegation race last season and just one point behind a Champions League spot in the current Bundesliga table has been rewarded with a new contract. FSV head coach Bo Henriksen received a new deal yesterday, signing a contract that runs through an extra year until 2027. Despite the fact that Mainz earned widespread criticism in German footballing circles for the poor administrative decision to sign trainer Jan Siewert to a permanent deal last season, club management simply couldn't waste time not extending with the Dane. Under Henriksen, Mainz have won 15, lost seven, and drawn nine Bundesliga fixtures. Henriksen overcame a bumpy start to the current campaign in which he drew specific criticism for being more of a motivator than tactician. Club sporting CEO Christian Heidel seemed to keep such critiques in mind when issuing his club statement. Heidel insisted that Henriksen passed all club managerial tests 'with flying colors'. 'He's a motivational genius,' Heidel noted. 'He's animated on the sidelines. I don't need someone who just stands around in a suit and tie. I'm also always impressed when a coach hires quality assistant coaches. Bo got performance coaches and athletic trainers because he says there are experts who can do certain things better than he can. A head coach can't do everything.' 'This was a decision of the heart,' Henriksen noted in his own statement. 'I have great love for these players, the staff, the city and this club. It's been an astonishing year. Crazy in many ways; the most crazy journey I've ever had, but also the most exciting and meaningful. The fans are great. We shared so much together.' GGFN | Peter Weis
Boston Globe
28-01-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
AI's electricity demand means cool new tech is coming to boring grids
Massachusetts-based Veir, Inc. is betting that superconducting wires will be an answer to utilities' and data center operators' problems, and it's preparing for the first large-scale deployment of its technology. Advertisement The startup wants to replace sagging metal cables typically strung between pylons or poles with similar-sized black pipes. Inside, there won't be a tangle of metal wires but superconducting tapes — made of a special material that carries electricity without losses — surrounded by liquid nitrogen at -196C (-321F). Veir claims the tech upgrade allows cables to carry 10 times as much electricity as similar-sized aluminum cables. Other companies have undertaken experimental deployments. One of the earliest was a German government-supported project in 2013 that involved major cable manufacturer Nexans building a kilometer-long line connecting two electrical substations in the city of Essen. The project cost €13.5 million ($14 million) and was in operation until 2021. But so far, there have been no large-scale commercial deployments of the technology because it's so costly. Maintaining a line at such a low temperature means installing additional equipment such as compression pumps every few kilometers, plus the further expense to keep liquid nitrogen colder than the moon after dark. Veir's Chief Executive Officer Tim Heidel believes the company has found the solution: Instead of relying on compressors, the company utilizes the same phenomenon that cools our body through sweating. As sweat evaporates, it absorbs heat from the skin, lowering the body's temperature. Similarly, Veir has built a trash-can sized device that is installed every few kilometers where some of the nitrogen from the pipe is allowed to evaporate and, in the process, re-cool the pipe. The lost nitrogen needs to be topped up, but equipment to do so can be placed at both ends of the long cable. Advertisement 'The pace at which data centers are being built and expanding and the urgency of being able to serve higher density and higher power loads is extremely high right now,' said Heidel. 'And so there seems to be quite a bit of interest.' Veir's investors are betting Heidel is right and that the company's technology will make it a commercially attractive proposition. In a new round of investment announced Tuesday, Veir raised $75 million led by Munich Re Ventures and supported by Microsoft Corp., National Grid Partners and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, among others. (Michael Bloomberg, majority owner of Bloomberg LP, is an investor in BEV.) In total, Veir has raised $115 million. The new round gives the startup at least two years of runway and will help it show that its technology works by deploying at a data center this year. Commercial projects will only start after that. But Veir's bet that utilities will pay a premium for cables that carry 10 times more power might not pay off. The company won't give precise numbers, though Veir says initially it can be competitive with some of the most expensive power cable projects, which can cost more than $10 million per mile. It may remain a 'niche' application, said Peter Wall, grids lead at BloombergNEF. Utilities may say 'we don't want to use it, but we'll eat the cost because it gets us something nothing else can.' There are also fresh questions about just how much energy demand will grow because of AI. China's DeepSeek has shown that it may be possible to develop advanced AI without needing as much computing power and energy. The company's release of a new model led to a huge rout for US tech stocks, with nearly $1 trillion wiped off their valuations this week. Advertisement If superconducting cables prove too expensive, California-based TS Conductor offers cables that have carbon fiber cores that are able to carry a lot more aluminum without breaking and increase the power capacity of cables three-fold. An even cheaper option is to use 'dynamic line rating' that relies on sensors rather than new cables. For example, Massachusetts-based LineVision's sensors provide real-time data on windspeeds and cable sag, which tells utilities when a cable is cool and able to carry more power. Without live information, sending more power through the cable can cause it to heat up so much that it sags and breaks, or worse, causes a fire. LineVision has raised $50 million, including some from the same investors like Microsoft and National Grid. The startup is busy deploying the technologies at commercial scale. For a project in the UK, LineVision installed 11 sensors across a 35-kilometer section of the grid that National Grid says saved it £14 million ($17.5 million) in 2022 alone by increasing power capacity by 19 percent. LineVision now has projects in eight countries. 'We're not looking to raise more money and believe we're on the pathway to profitability,' said Jonathan Marmillo, the company's chief product officer. Whether AI's energy demand forecasts turn out to be real or not, it's clear that utilities need to adapt to a changing landscape. With the rise of cheap renewables, energy storage and grid-enhancing technologies, 'more than any other commodity provider, utilities have been forced to deploy new technologies,' said Mark Daly, head of innovation and technology at BNEF. Advertisement
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI Developer Seethes at Success of DeepSeek
DeepSeek's new chain-of-thought AI model has Silicon Valley developers seething that a startup from — gasp — China could build something just as good, if not better, than what they've come up with, for a fraction of the cost and with far superior energy efficiency. Exhibit A: OpenAI programmer Steven Heidel, who couldn't help injecting some old-fashioned China bashing to distract from the fact that his company just got smoked in a race it had a several year and multibillion dollar head-start in. "Americans sure love giving their data away to the CCP in exchange for free stuff," Heidel wrote on X, referring to the Communist Party of China. Following overwhelming backlash, his tweet was appended with a community note: "DeepSeek can be run locally without an internet connection, unlike OpenAI's models." This is true. DeepSeek's r1 model is open-source, totally free, and if you're concerned about your privacy, you can download and run all 404 gigs of it on your own rig. Because it's a chain-of-thought model, anyone can see how the AI "thinks," which goes a long way as far as trust. (After the community note dunk, Heidel followed up with a post urging users to only use the DeepSeek model locally.) Needless to say, to smear the AI model, whose underlying code is free for anyone to poke around in, as some sort of Chinese spyware is really rich coming from someone who works at OpenAI, a company that quickly ditched its noble, non-profit and open-source beginnings as soon as it got a taste of money. Today, it's firmly for-profit and closed-source. It'd be remiss to brush aside privacy concerns surrounding Chinese platforms, and indeed the censorship present in the app version of DeepSeek. But OpenAI's data ethics track record isn't exactly squeaky clean, either. It trained its AI model by devouring everyone's data on the surface web without ever stopping to ask permission. It and its CEO Sam Altman have also invested in a number of companies whose commitment to privacy is questionable. Plus, pretty much every outfit in Silicon Valley pawns off their customer's data to data brokers, who in turn sell that information to thousands of other companies so they can barrage you with ads — and most perniciously, to government agencies for surveillance purposes. To that end, it might be worth mentioning that OpenAI appointed a former National Security Administration director to its board — a move that Edward Snowden blasted as a "calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on earth." Of course, Heidel isn't alone. Just days before his faux-pas, Neal Khosla, CEO of the AI-powered health clinic Curai, called DeepSeek a "CCP state psyop" and an act of "economic warfare to make American AI unprofitable." (Counterpoint: American AI is why American AI is unprofitable.) In reality, the US has been waging plenty of economic warfare on that front, including implementing export controls in 2023 that effectively banned advanced US-made AI chips, including those made by Nvidia, from entering China. Ironically, that pressure may have pushed Chinese developers to make its models more efficient with less hardware, while American competitors gluttonously relied on scaling up their datacenters comprising literal billions of dollars worth of GPUs to make gains. That the immediate response of Silicon Valley to DeepSeek's achievements is to link it with CCP conspiracies is a sign of deep-seated insecurity, and — let's face it — racism. The same anti-Chinese rhetoric, similarly under the guise of protecting Americans' privacy, fueled the push for the (now-suspended) ban on TikTok. "I think if any of these AI bros were remotely serious about using this technology to improve society they'd be excited at the idea of someone managing to run laps around them for 1/10th the computing power but instead they are seething, sinophobically," wrote a Bluesky user. More on AI: Mega-Hyped Chinese AI App DeepSeek Says It's Been Hit by "Large-Scale Malicious Attacks"
