Latest news with #Lauderdale
Mercury
02-07-2025
- Sport
- Mercury
SFL Premier League: AFL 247-gamer Mitch Robinson signs for Lauderdale
Don't miss out on the headlines from Sport. Followed categories will be added to My News. Lauderdale has signed former Tassie AFL star Mitch Robinson before the June 30 deadline but there are question marks over whether he will be available for an SFL premiership push. And if he does take to the field, it's unlikely to cost the Bombers a cent according to coach Brent Dolliver. 'It's probably not going to happen,' Dolliver said. 'He touched base with the club the other day and asked if he could sign with us for the back end of the year in case things open up. 'He's done his hamstring in a game he played at the weekend. 'His priority is to play in the EJ Whitten game and he just wanted to sign with someone in case the opportunity opened up.' Lauderdale and Robinson snuck the player registration through before the cut-off on Monday. 'He is registered with the club but he hasn't signed a contract or anything,' Dolliver said. 'You have to play four games to play in the finals and we've got six games left. 'He just wanted to link up with the club in case it became possible. 'But he's going to struggle to get up to play in the next couple of weeks because of his hamstring.' Lauderdale could consider playing Robinson in a home game late in the season to get people through the gate. 'It's possible, but I'm of the opinion that I don't want to drop a player just to bring someone in like that,' Dolliver said. 'I know it would be good for the club but we could do something more along the lines of a sportsman's night or something with him. 'It was very last minute to get in before the cut-off. 'We will touch base with him over the next few weeks to see where he's at.' Glenorchy boosted its coffers with a one-off appearance by Tasmania's former Carlton and Gold Coast bigman Levi Casboult in a game that saw the Magpies topple Lauderdale at KGV, and Huonville Lions opened their season with a win over New Norfolk at Huonville Oval with a one-off game by Collingwood's Brownlow Medal-winning superstar Dane Swan in the Community League.
The Independent
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Historian likens becoming MBE to receiving ‘monumental bunch of flowers'
An historian who founded the Borders Book Festival has said being recognised in the King's Birthday Honours feels like receiving a 'monumental bunch of flowers'. Alistair Moffat, 74, is celebrating becoming a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in recognition of services to literature and culture in the same week as this year's festival. He has written more than 40 books on Scottish history and is considered one of the most popular Scottish historians. He founded the Borders Book Festival 22 years ago, and is based in Ettrick and Lauderdale in the Borders. The festival has become one of the UK's most highly regarded literary festivals, attracting an international audience, and now draws more than 30,000 visitors who have contributed an estimated £3 million to the local economy. Mr Moffat was also a critical figure in the creation of The Great Tapestry of Scotland in 2010, acting as co-chairman and narrative creator, which tells the history of Scotland in visual panels, similar to the Bayeux Tapestry. The Great Tapestry of Scotland, now installed in its purpose-built museum in Galashiels, in the Borders, has become a major tourist attraction and was visited by the King and Queen in 2023 on its 10th anniversary. It was a collaboration of ideas shared between Mr Moffat, author Sir Alexander McCall-Smith and artist Andrew Crummy and was hand stitched by 1,000 women from across Scotland. The tapestry tells the story of 420 million years of Scottish history, heritage, innovations and culture through its 160 panels. Mr Moffat receives the royal honour for showing a 'strong and consistent commitment to bringing the arts to local communities', including through the tapestry. Mr Moffat said: 'It is just a monumental bunch of flowers to get. 'One of the reasons was for starting the Borders Book Festival, which starts on Thursday. 'The announcement will be in the middle of the book festival, which started 22 years ago. 'It has a big, beneficial impact on the region, and it brings in lots of visitors. The MBE has been very well-timed. 'The Great Tapestry of Scotland began 15 years ago, Alexander McCall-Smith rang me to say 'go and look at a tapestry in Edinburgh about Bonnie Prince Charlie'. It had 50 panels, I was astounded at how beautiful it was. 'I started working on the idea of The Great Tapestry of Scotland, it ended up with 150 panels. 'I had always dreamed of doing something like this. ' The King and Queen opened it in 2023, I showed them around. It is telling Scotland's history in pictures, and it was made by women.'
NBC News
27-05-2025
- NBC News
11 hospitalized, including 2 kids, after boat explosion in Florida
Nearly a dozen people, including two children, were hospitalized after a boat explosion and fire in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Memorial Day evening, officials said. The incident was reported around 5:45 p.m. Monday near the New River Triangle, not far from the Lauderdale Yacht Club on Southeast 12th Court. U.S. Coast Guard officials said there were 13 people on board the boat when there was an explosion. 'For reasons that we don't know yet, a boat exploded, it tossed people into the water, good Samaritans came over right away and started rescuing them,' Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue spokesman Frank Guzman said. 'It's too soon to know how this happened. We have a fire investigator on scene, as well.' Footage from a surveillance camera captured the moment the fireball erupted on the boat, and showed multiple people spilling into the water. Guzman confirmed there were 11 patients, including two children, who were initially taken to Broward Health Medical Center. 'A number of the patients had significant burns and are being transported to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where they have a burn unit,' Guzman said. 'A lot of them had burns to much of their body.' Officials at Jackson Memorial said they received 10 patients, including eight adults who were in good condition and two children who were in fair condition. One patient had to be intubated. Antonio Rivero said he was with family members on the boat when it went up in flames. 'Tried to fuel up the boat, and must have been a gas leak and, you know, spark went off and explosion,' Rivero said. 'One of the guys' pants were blown off, so it was bad.' Rivero, 32, suffered burns to his arm, but his wife, Cassandra, and their two children remained hospitalized Monday night. 'They're OK because they're on a lot of meds, but other than that they're fine,' he said. At least one witness reported seeing an explosion and said they saw multiple people with burn injuries who were brought to the yacht club docks. The victims had burned legs and bathing suits that appeared ripped and burned to shreds, the witness said. Two other witnesses said they were on a dinghy at the sandbar when the boat exploded. 'When they went to start their boat up, it just exploded. There was a huge fireball and people were kind of falling off the boat,' Bret Triano said. 'We were at the sandbar too and we just tried to go help out.' Triano and Marisa Toomesn were able to rescue some of the victims. 'There were a couple boats trying to pick people up and one guy just didn't get picked up so we went over to him,' Triano said. 'He was screaming.' 'He was burned pretty badly,' Toomesn said. 'He was saying, 'Save me. Please, don't let me die. I'm so hot, I need water,'' Triano said. 'He just kept repeating, 'I want water, I want water.'' Aerial footage from Chopper 6 showed Fort Lauderdale Police, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Broward Sheriff's Office assisting Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue. Crews were seen examining the boat involved, which was tied up to a nearby sea wall. Guzman said crews also rescued a dog that had been on the boat that wasn't injured. The FWC and fire officials will investigate the cause of the explosion.
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
California Nuclear Power Plant Deploys Generative AI Safety System
America's first nuclear power plant to use artificial intelligence is, ironically, the last operational one in California. As CalMatters reports, the Diablo Canyon power plant is slated to be decommissioned by the end of this decade. In the interim, the plant's owner, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), claims that it's deploying its "Neutron Enterprise" tool — which will be the first nuclear plant in the nation to use AI — in a series of escalating stages. Less than 18 months ago, Diablo Canyon was hurtling headlong toward a decommissioning that would have begun in 2024 and ended this year. In late 2023, however, the California Public Utility Commission voted to stay its execution for five years, kicking the can on the inevitable to 2029 and 2030, respectively. Just under a year after that vote, PG&E announced that it was teaming up with a startup called Atomic Canyon, which was founded with the plant in mind and is also based in the coastal Central California town of San Luis Obispo. That partnership, and the first "stage" of the tool's deployment, brought some of Nvidia's high-powered H100 AI chips to the dying nuclear plant, and with them the compute power needed for generative artificial intelligence. Running on an internal server without cloud access, Neutron Enterprise's biggest use case, much like so-called AI "search engines," is summarizing a massive trove of millions of regulatory documents that have been fed into it. According to Atomic Canyon CEO and cofounder Trey Lauderdale, this isn't risky — though anyone who has used AI to summarize information knows better, because the tech still often makes factual mistakes. Speaking to CalMatters, PG&E executive Maureen Zalawick insisted that the AI program will be more of a "copilot" than a "decision-maker," meant to assist flesh-and-blood employees rather than replace them. "We probably spend about 15,000 hours a year searching through our multiple databases and records and procedures," Zalawick explained. "And that's going to shrink that time way down." Lauderdale put it in even simpler terms. "You can put this on the record," he told CalMatters. "The AI guy in nuclear says there is no way in hell I want AI running my nuclear power plant right now." If that "right now" caveat gives you pause, you're not alone. Given the shifting timelines for the closure of Diablo Canyon in a state that has been painstakingly phasing out its nuclear facilities since the 1970s over concerns about toxic waste — and the fact that Lauderdale claims to be talking to other plants in other states — there's ample cause for concern. "The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day," cautioned Tamara Kneese of the tech watchdog Data & Society, "I don't really trust that it would stop there." As head of Data & Society's Climate, Technology, and Justice program, Kneese said that while using AI to help sift through tomes of documents is worthwhile, "trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny." This is the same company whose polluting propensities were exposed by the real-life Erin Brokovich in the 1990s, after all. California lawmakers, meanwhile, were impressed by the tailored usage Atomic Canyon and PG&E propose for the program — but it remains to be seen whether or not that narrow functionality will remain that way. More on AI and energy: Former Google CEO Tells Congress That 99 Percent of All Electricity Will Be Used to Power Superintelligent AI
