Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

California’s Assembly Will Consider Only Industry Bills Meant to Strip Our Privacy Rights We are disappointed the California Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee will not hear A.B. 1760 , which would have substantially strengthened the California Consumer Privacy Act. Tomorrow, the Privacy Committee will instead vote on several bills backed by Big Tech interests that will erode the CCPA and the promises this law made to give all Californians the privacy rights they want and deserve. California’s legislators must stop bills that erode our privacy and we will not stop fighting for strong privacy legislation. In coming weeks, we will work to pass S.B. 561 , which will improve the enforcement of the CCPA by ensuring that people can sue the companies that violate their privacy rights, and strengthening the powers of the California Attorney General. Tech companies are saying that they support privacy yet still deploy their money and pressure to silence real privacy bills...

There are many things that can cause a power outage, wildlife is one of those. Animal intrusion into utility and industrial substations causes a significant number of outages that are highly preventable. In fact, this issue represents up to 20% of all power outages , which are avoidable if utilities and industrial customers implement effective protection measures. Mice, squirrels, snakes or birds Above-ground cables are putting animals at risk of electrocution, collision and loss of habitat. Animals like mice or rats, squirrels and snakes seek out substations for food and shelter. Birds are the most common cause of animal faults on both transmission systems and air-insulated substations. It’s estimated that some 25% of juvenile and 6% of adult stork die annually from electrocutions and power line collisions. The risk of collision is highest with thin or low-hanging wires in sensitive areas, especially for large birds with limited maneuverability and those migrating at nigh...

Look around. AI is everywhere. From our daily use of Siri, Cortana, and/or Alexa to Netflix’s ability to recommend exactly what we like to watch on TV at any time. For someone like me who has been working in the field of AI for more than 20 years, the state of AI today continues to amaze me. In the earlier days, creating AI models was, in a word, difficult . Building an AI algorithm, testing it, and re-training the model. This was a hard process. Now, our ability to store and process large amounts of data; readily-available, easy-to-deploy AI; and cognitive and analytics services in the cloud have changed everything, giving AI techies and business leaders alike massive abilities we couldn’t have imagined just two decades ago. As AI applications roll out every day, the question remains, “What’s the business ROI?”  This is where scaling up AI becomes difficult. How can we leap forward in our efforts to ensure that AI’s tipping point for digital transformation delivers real busine...

One of the clear indicators of corporate leadership on energy and sustainability is the recent acceleration of publicly announced goals. Many companies have made quantifiable and measurable commitments to reduce their impact on the environment while simultaneously reducing operating costs and improving economics. Third-party reporting and benchmarking programs are growing in both size and significance. Consider: More than 500 companies worldwide have already set science-based carbon reduction targets via the Science-Based Targets Initiative ( SBTI ), while 63% of companies have set a clean energy procurement goal. The trend toward public goal setting was recently validated by research conducted by Schneider Electric and GreenBiz. More than 300 energy and sustainability industry professionals shared what motivates their companies to action and the barriers that stand in the way. Their responses revealed that publicly announced energy and sustainability commitments help companies move...

We’re in the Uncanny Valley of Targeted Advertising Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, thinks people want targeted advertising. The “overwhelming feedback,” he said multiple times during his congressional testimony, was that people want to see “good and relevant” ads. Why then are so many Facebook users, including leaders of state in the U.S. Senate and House , so fed up and creeped out by the uncannily on-the-nose ads? Targeted advertising on Facebook has gotten to the point that it’s so “good,” it’s bad—for users, who feel surveilled by the platform, and for Facebook, who is rapidly losing its users’ trust. But there’s a solution, which Facebook must prioritize: stop collecting data from users without their knowledge or explicit, affirmative consent. It should never be the user’s responsibility to have to guess what’s happening behind the curtain. Right now, most users don’t have a clear understanding of all the types of data that Facebook collects or how it’s an...

Minnesota Supreme Court Ruling Will Help Shed Light on Police Use of Biometric Technology A decision by the Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday will help the public learn more about how law enforcement use of privacy invasive biometric technology. The decision in Webster v. Hennepin County is mostly good news for the requester in the case, who sought the public records as part of a 2015 EFF and MuckRock campaign to track mobile biometric technology use by law enforcement across the country. EFF filed a brief in support of Tony Webster, arguing that the public needed to know more about how officials use these technologies. Across the country, law enforcement agencies have been adopting technologies that allow cops to identify subjects by matching their distinguishing physical characteristics to giant repositories of biometric data. This could include images of faces , fingerprints, irises, or even tattoos . In many cases, police use mobile devices in the field to scan and ide...

  Automation systems control physical assets that transform energy and raw materials into finished products, and all being well, the finished product is sold at profit (which in simple terms is the difference between that product’s selling price and the cost of the energy and raw materials used to make it). It is also important to keep in mind production assets are significant capital investments. If you’re in business, you’ll know all about maximizing your Return On Capital Employed (ROCE). For production assets, this generally means making as much product as possible while keeping the plant running reliably and safely. To maximize asset productivity while optimizing (not necessarily reducing to a minimum) energy and raw material costs requires access to data from multiple points in the plant’s various systems. This data can then be analyzed and used to make adjustments to processes in real time. As we know, the performance of new electronic components continues to advance at a...