Latest news with #Teicher
American Military News
18-05-2025
- Automotive
- American Military News
Waymo recalls more than 1,200 automated vehicles after minor crashes
Waymo, the autonomous ride-hailing company that launched its services in Los Angeles late last year, is recalling more than 1,200 vehicles due to a software defect, the National Highway Traffic Safety Assn. said Wednesday. The recall comes after a series of minor crashes with gates, chains and other obstacles in the road that did not result in any injuries, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company said in a filing with the NHTSA. The recall applies to 1,212 driverless vehicles operating on Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving software. A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives near Venice Beach on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (/TNS) Waymo released a software update to resolve the issue, and that update has already been rolled out in all affected vehicles, the recall notice said. The company operates more than 1,500 vehicles across Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin. The recall does not affect any vehicles currently on the road, said Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher. Self-driving vehicles have come under increased scrutiny following several issues with Tesla's autonomous technology and a 2023 incident in which a pedestrian was seriously injured by a Cruise vehicle. The NHTSA opened an investigation into Waymo in May 2024 after receiving reports of 22 incidents involving the fifth-generation software. The agency said several incidents under investigation 'involved collisions with clearly visible objects that a competent driver would be expected to avoid.' The investigation remains open. In February 2024, Waymo recalled 444 vehicles after two minor collisions in Arizona. Although incidents involving Waymo vehicles generate attention, the vehicles are safer than human drivers, according to data collected by insurer Swiss Re. Based on data collected by Waymo, their driverless vehicles had 81% fewer airbag deployment crashes, 78% fewer injury-causing crashes and 62% fewer police-reported crashes than traditional vehicles driving the same distance. Waymo vehicles rely on cameras, sensors and a type of laser radar called lidar to operate autonomously. 'Waymo provides more than 250,000 paid trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments in the U.S.,' Teicher said. 'Our record of reducing injuries over tens of millions of fully autonomous miles driven shows our technology is making roads safer.' Operated by Google's parent company, Alphabet, Waymo put its first autonomous vehicle on the road in 2015. It launched its driverless ride-hailing service known as Waymo One in 2020, and has plans to expand to Atlanta, Miami and Washington, D.C., next year. ___ © 2025 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Waymo recalls more than 1,200 automated vehicles after minor crashes
Waymo, the autonomous ride-hailing company that launched its services in Los Angeles late last year, is recalling more than 1,200 vehicles due to a software defect, the National Highway Traffic Safety Assn. said Wednesday. The recall comes after a series of minor crashes with gates, chains and other obstacles in the road that did not result in any injuries, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company said in a filing with the NHTSA. The recall applies to 1,212 driverless vehicles operating on Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving software. Waymo released a software update to resolve the issue, and that update has already been rolled out in all affected vehicles, the recall notice said. The company operates more than 1,500 vehicles across Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin. The recall does not affect any vehicles currently on the road, said Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher. Read more: Waymo is getting ready to tackle Los Angeles' freeways. How have the robotaxis fared so far? Self-driving vehicles have come under increased scrutiny following several issues with Tesla's autonomous technology and a 2023 incident in which a pedestrian was seriously injured by a Cruise vehicle. The NHTSA opened an investigation into Waymo in May 2024 after receiving reports of 22 incidents involving the fifth-generation software. The agency said several incidents under investigation "involved collisions with clearly visible objects that a competent driver would be expected to avoid." The investigation remains open. Read more: U.S. agency launches investigation into Tesla's self-driving technology In February 2024, Waymo recalled 444 vehicles after two minor collisions in Arizona. Although incidents involving Waymo vehicles generate attention, the vehicles are safer than human drivers, according to data collected by insurer Swiss Re. Based on data collected by Waymo, their driverless vehicles had 81% fewer airbag deployment crashes, 78% fewer injury-causing crashes and 62% fewer police-reported crashes than traditional vehicles driving the same distance. Waymo vehicles rely on cameras, sensors and a type of laser radar called lidar to operate autonomously. Read more: L.A. man tries to drive off in autonomous Waymo car. Company says it's prepared 'Waymo provides more than 250,000 paid trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments in the U.S.," Teicher said. "Our record of reducing injuries over tens of millions of fully autonomous miles driven shows our technology is making roads safer." Operated by Google's parent company, Alphabet, Waymo put its first autonomous vehicle on the road in 2015. It launched its driverless ride-hailing service known as Waymo One in 2020, and has plans to expand to Atlanta, Miami and Washington, D.C., next year. Sign up for our Wide Shot newsletter to get the latest entertainment business news, analysis and insights. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
New York Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
It's All Rhythm: A New Festival Embraces Percussive Dance
Fans of the sometimes disrespected genre known as dance music have a quip: What other kind of music is there? A similar crack could be made by artists put into a category called rhythm dance. What dance isn't in some sense rhythmic? The new Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival, at 92NY and Works & Process at Guggenheim New York from April 21-27, addresses the question from the opposite direction: What do top artists in tap, flamenco, hip-hop, swing, kathak and Appalachian clogging have in common? And what connections might spark if they were programmed side by side? 'We're talking about percussive dance,' said the tap and swing dancer Caleb Teicher, a curator of the festival. 'This is dance that has a deep relationship to the floor, dance that is expressive through musical phrasing and rhythm and a lot of African American diasporic ideas of call and response and improvisation.' The need for such a festival arises in part from the needs that percussive dancers share. Most prefer live music and sprung wooden floors, which they consider instruments. Most require floor microphones, sensitive sound design and a rehearsal space where they're allowed to imperil the floor. Most still face some measure of condescension or exclusion from the rest of the dance world. 'A lot of mixed bill programming is very happy to have three contemporary dance or ballet companies,' Teicher said, 'but if there's one percussive dance or street dance company on each program, that would be a lot, and there certainly wouldn't be two.' Space in New York where such dancers can rehearse has been shrinking, and Tap City, the annual festival that the American Tap Dance Foundation put on for nearly 25 years, ceased last year. 'We still don't have a home,' said Brenda Bufalino, 87, a grande dame of tap who was a leader in making it into a concert form in the 1980s. The American Tap Dance Foundation grew out of her pioneering American Tap Dance Orchestra. In a recent interview, she remembered the difficulties of finding somewhere to rehearse and of touring to theaters set up for other kinds of dance. 'We were never made to feel that we were part of the dance world,' she said, 'and we still don't have any theaters dedicated to our art form.' Despite such obstacles, tap and other percussive dance forms are thriving artistically. Bufalino recalled that when she and her mentor, Honi Coles, started teaching tap in New York in 1978, they had three students. 'Now there are so many brilliant tap dancers and good tap work being seen all over the place,' she said, mentioning Teicher and Michelle Dorrance. 'People are really stretching out and using ideas.' One goal of Uptown Rhythm is to help address the imbalance between this artistic ferment and the space and resources available to develop it. 'We want to support as many of these artists as we can, but also shed light so that other organizations might open up more space,' said another of the festival's curators, Alison Manning, co-executive director of the Y's Harkness Dance Center. In a sense, the festival is an outgrowth of Tap the Yard, a festival that Manning organized at the Yard on Martha's Vineyard from 2012 to 2019. A tap dancer herself, she wanted to champion what she called her 'secret love,' but she and her fellow curator David Parker also included hip-hop, folk and classical Indian forms. 'That festival blew our attendance numbers wide open,' Manning said. 'It worked as an entry point, because there was something for everyone in it.' With Uptown Rhythm, Manning said, 'We're not just throwing a smorgasbord of types of dance at the wall. We have very specific ideas about who we're programming and what conversations might connect them.' The Tuesday program, for example, combines classical lineages and roots music. Rachna Nivas, an adept in kathak, a classical Indian percussive dance influenced by both Hindu and Islamic court traditions, is performing a condensed version of a traditional solo, combining storytelling and improvisational, rivalrous exchanges with musicians from India. How will these exchanges compare to those between the Appalachian flatfooter Nic Gareiss and the innovative roots musician Jake Blount on the same program? 'There's a real feeling of camaraderie and kinship,' Nivas said about the festival, noting that she had worked with tap dancers before and that they had bonded not only musically but also over a shared reverence for elders and ancestors. 'This is what real diversity looks like,' she added. Her guru, Chitresh Das, helped to found the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival in 1978: 'It was groundbreaking,' she said, 'but, like world dance, the term is still othering. This rhythm festival isn't like that. It's about finding common ground.' Billy and Bobby McClain, the identical-twin hip-hop duo known as the Wondertwins, performed several times in Tap the Yard. At 92NY on Wednesday, they join Ladies of Hip-Hop and Chrybaby Cozie, a creator of the hip-hop style Lite Feet; but also the first-class tap dancers Derick Grant and Nicholas Van Young. Putting tap and hip-hop together makes a lot of sense, Billy McClain said. 'They play off each other,' he added. 'In hip-hop, you see the feet move but don't hear them, and in tap it's the opposite. But it's all rhythm.' When McClain and his brother were starting out in the late 1970s, they were inspired by brother acts — tap duos like the Nicholas Brothers and the Hines Brothers. Performing on the same program with tap dancers now, McClain said, 'gives us fresh ideas' — ideas they can use. Not all the Uptown Rhythm programs are about juxtaposition. Some showcase the outcome of earlier mingling. The Thursday show commemorates the 25th anniversary of the Austrian-born Max Pollak crossing tap with Afro-Cuban rumba, creating RumbaTap, both a style and an on-and-off ensemble. In New York in the early 1990s, Pollak became an acolyte of masters in the jazz tap tradition like Jimmy Slyde and Lon Chaney. But he also became interested in the Latin jazz being played at jam sessions at the Nuyorican Poets Café. Studying Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz drumming, he began transferring those rhythms to tap and body percussion, then tried sitting in with musicians at the Nuyorican. 'And they were like, 'You got something there,'' Pollak said. One night, members of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, an eminent Cuban rumba group, came to the jam. After watching Pollak perform, they wanted to know who had taught him to dance like that; when he told them he had developed the style himself, they asked him to teach it to them. He was flabbergasted and then astonished again when, during a lesson, they were able to replicate what he was doing immediately. 'That's when I thought, 'I am onto something big here,'' Pollak said. Pollak soon visited Cuba, carrying tap shoes with him. Los Muñequitos put what he taught them into their act, and the group's director told Pollak: 'You have given us a gift. You are part of this family now.' For Uptown Rhythm, that family is reuniting. Coming from Cuba are Barbaro Ramos, Pollak's first Muñequitos student, and also Ramos's son and nephew, whom Pollak first taught 25 years ago, when they were little boys. This edition of the RumbaTap company includes both alumni, like Lynn Schwab and Lisa LaTouche, and curious young hotshots like Jared Alexander, Tommy Wasiuta and Liz Carroll. While that show will be a retrospective of a hybrid percussive form, the Friday program is a cornucopia of almost all the festival's facets. LaTasha Barnes, a dancer who embodies what she calls 'the jazz continuum' connecting Lindy hop with house dance, shares the evening with Soles of Duende, a trio made up of the tap dancer Amanda Castro, the flamenco dancer Arielle Rosales and the kathak dancer Brinda Guha. 'There's a natural conversational dynamic that happens with other rhythm dancers,' Rosales said, emphasizing that her group is not a fusion project but that kind of conversation. 'Not only are we in solidarity with other percussive artists, but we're also modeling what that kinship can look like,' Guha said. All the artists in the festival, she added, 'share the responsibility of preserving our forms, making sure people don't forget them, while also allowing ourselves the freedom to create and be innovative.' Someone who knows all about that balance is the festival's final artist: Bufalino. Her premiere tackles music that she said had been 'dogging her for decades': 'Meditation on Integration' by Charles Mingus, her favorite composer. She herself is dancing in it a little: 'I'm not doing 10 choruses anymore,' she said. In addition to her and Joe Fonda, a bassist she has been working with for 40 years, the cast is made of up young mentees, including her granddaughter, Alice Baum, who is also an opera singer. Bufalino has written a coloratura melody for Baum to sing alongside the Mingus. Last year, Bufalino announced, not for the first time, that she was retiring. But when Duke Dang, the executive director of Works & Process, asked her to make a new work for Uptown Rhythm, she didn't take a lot of convincing. She got excited about the Mingus music and the dancers and the musicians. She got caught up in the rhythm once more.
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
US' Leading Autonomous Vehicle Company Collected 589 Parking Tickets Last Year in San Francisco
Waymo, the US' leading self-driving taxi company that's backed by Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc, collected almost 600 parking tickets last year in San Francisco, the city where the rideshare service began testing in 2021. Tickets for Waymo's fleet, which is comprised of 300 vehicles, equated to $65,065. Comparatively, Los Angeles tagged Waymo with 75 tickets last year, where the company has 100 deployed vehicles, but its service was launched in November of 2024. Waymo's fleet is fully electric and primarily uses Jaguar's I-PACE SUV. The autonomous rideshare company has attributed its San Francisco tickets to vehicles dropping off passengers in commercial loading zones when alternative drop-off areas were congested main roads or a spot too far from the rider's destination, along with brief parking between trips when cars were too far from Waymo's facility. Waymo SUVs have also been cited for blocking traffic and ignoring street cleaning schedules. Waymo spokesman Ethan Teicher told The Washington Post that safety is the rideshare company's highest priority 'both for people who choose to ride with us and with whom we share the streets.' Teicher added that Waymo cars are designed 'to take the safest action available during the few minutes we are picking up or dropping off riders, which is when many of these parking citations occurred.' Sterling Haywood, who has been a San Francisco parking control officer for 17 years, told The Washington Post: 'I gave it [Waymo vehicle] the same courtesy I would give if there was somebody in the car.' Haywood described this courtesy as honking twice to warn the Waymo taxi that it was parked in a street cleaning zone during enforcement hours in San Francisco's Mission District. After the Waymo vehicle didn't move, he placed a $96 dollar ticket on its window. Waymo has received the most tickets for street cleaning violations at 138 citations, however, it's important to note that Waymo's 589 tickets last year in San Francisco represent less than 1% of the city's 1.2 million issued tickets during 2024. In addition to Los Angeles, Waymo operates in Phoenix, Arizona, and Austin, Texas. Waymo operates 24/7 across San Francisco, so accounting for less than 1% of the city's tickets during 2024 can be viewed as quite impressive. The organization's autonomous technology is also relatively early in its development, launching in San Francisco in 2021. Unlike General Motors-backed Cruise's self-driving vehicles, which hit San Francisco streets in 2022, Waymo is still operating its fleet and growing. Cruise suspended its operations in October 2023 after a series of incidents, including dragging a pedestrian, which occurred during the same month. General Motors had invested $10 billion into Cruise by the time the company shut down. While it would be ideal for Waymo SUVs to avoid tickets altogether during instances like parking in street cleaning zones during enforcement hours, the rideshare service would likely receive more criticism if its fleet dropped off pedestrians in dangerous areas to avoid citations.
