We may call them air taxis but let’s face it, flying cars are really just small airplanes at this point. That may be about to change, though, thanks to the Klein Vision AirCar, an aircraft that actually looks and functions like the vehicle you drive to work each day.
Late last week, the Slovakian startup shared a video of the AirCar prototype successfully completing its maiden flight. The short clip doesn’t just show off the aircraft soaring through the sky; it also displays the vehicle’s driving capabilities. It looks as if the AirCar will be just as comfortable flying through the clouds as it is speeding across asphalt. This is likely due to the fact that the prototype is a road-ready car that can transform into a working plane with the touch of a few buttons. At the beginning of Klein Vision’s video, the futuristic-looking AirCar can be seen driving onto the tarmac at Piestany airport. The rear section of the car then slides back as two wings pop out of the car and begin to unfold. Once the wings are fully expanded, the prototype speeds off down the runway and takes off into the sky. It then flies around the airfield before safely landing back on the ground. Once the flight is complete, the wings retract back into the car, and it drives off. While the AirCar’s design leaves something to be desired—it looks like something from a straight-to-VOD sci-fi movie—its driving abilities look certain to set it apart from the rest of the current crop of flying cars, including the SkyDrive SD03 and the Volocopter VoloCity. The ultra-lightweight two-seater is powered by a 1.6-liter BMW engine that put out 140 horsepower, according to a press release from the company. The startup also claims that the craft will have a flying range of roughly 620 miles and be able to reach a top flying speed of 124 mph. Visit food paper bags homepage for more details. While those numbers are pretty impressive, the company seems especially proud of the fact that its flying car can actually drive. “With AirCar you will arrive at your destination without the hassle of getting a ride to [an] airport and passing through commercial security, you can drive your AirCar to the golf course, the office, the mall or your hotel and park it in a normal parking space,” co-founder Anton Zajac said in a statement. With its first successful flights notched only 18 months after development begin, Klein Vision is ready to continue moving forward with the AirCar. The company plans to put the vehicle into production within the next six months.
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A weird “snake” found in Virginia with a half-moon shaped head has been identified not as a reptile, but as a large invasive species of Asian worm.
Virginia Wildlife Management and Control posted photos of the creature last week, noting someone in Midlothian, Virginia, called the company’s Snake Identification Hotline asking for help and even sent a video. Midlothian is just west of Richmond. “We identify thousands of snakes every year ... but the problem is, we’ve never seen anything like it before and we’re not sure if it’s a freak of nature,” the company posted Oct. 28 on Facebook. “So, if anyone has any idea what it is, please feel free to comment. It was described as being around 10-12 inches long.” In an update, the company said the pest was identified as a hammerhead worm, which the Texas Invasive Species Institute says is “a terrestrial flatworm” native to Southeast Asia. The species is hermaphroditic, meaning they have “both male and female genitalia,” according to Biologydictionary.net. Hundreds have commented on the Facebook post, with many noting the tough-to-kill worms “are essentially immortal,” a joke that has an element of truth to it. “Flatworms may not look that exciting, but they have an astonishing superpower: regeneration. When bits of them are amputated, these bits can regrow into complete worms — even from snipped-off fragments that represent 1/300th of the worm’s body,” Live Science reports. Visit PE bags homepage for more details. To kill the worm, Facebook commenters suggested everything from salt to vinegar to burning it. “Cutting them creates two instead of killing the one,” one commenter said. It’s believed the species hitchhiked its way to the U.S. decades ago in the horticulture trade and specimens have been found in greenhouses as far north as Maine, the Texas Invasive Species Institute says. Virginia is not among the state’s where the worms have been found, but they have turned up in nearby North Carolina, the institute reports. The person who found the worm was not identified, nor was the exact location. Virginia Wildlife Management officials told McClatchy News they did not kill the worm: “They just left it alone.” The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sided with Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson in his ongoing effort to avoid a lawsuit filed by a police officer injured during a 2016 protest in Louisiana triggered by the police killing of a Black man.
The justices threw out a lower court ruling that had allowed the lawsuit to proceed and said that more analysis was needed on whether Louisiana state law allows for such a claim. McKesson has argued that the rights of freedom of speech and assembly under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment should shield him from the lawsuit that accused him of negligence for leading the protest in Baton Rouge, but the court did not resolve that issue. "The constitutional issue, though undeniably important, is implicated only if Louisiana law permits recovery under these circumstances in the first place," the court said in the unsigned ruling. The officer sustained serious injuries after being struck in the face by a rock or piece of concrete thrown by an unknown person, not by McKesson. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas dissented and newly appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate, the ruling said. The officer, whose identify was not disclosed in the lawsuit, sued the Black Lives Matter organization and McKesson seeking monetary damages over an incident at a July 2016 protest in Baton Rouge. The negligence lawsuit argued that McKesson should have known that violence would result from his actions leading the protest, which was one of many around the country that year arising from incidents involving police and Black individuals. The protest took place outside the police department in the aftermath of the police killing of Alton Sterling, a Black man, after a struggle outside a convenience store where he was selling homemade CDs. The incident was caught on video. McKesson, a civil rights activist who was one of the leading voices in the Black Lives Matter movement, said that his First Amendment rights outweigh any potential liability for negligence he could face under Louisiana law. His lawyers said that if protest organizers can be sued for actions taken by others without their involvement, it could enable opponents to effectively block future demonstrations because activists would have to direct resources to battling litigation and could face monetary damages at trial. McKesson's lawyers, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have cited a 1982 Supreme Court ruling involving Black civil rights activists in Mississippi that limited liability for protest leaders over the conduct of others when they are involved in actions protected by the First Amendment. Visit hardcover book printing homepage for more details. The officer, according to the lawsuit, suffered loss of teeth, a jaw injury, a brain injury and a head injury. The Black Lives Matter movement was formed after the high-profile killing of a Black 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin by a man named George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012. Its activists have criticized overly aggressive policing particularly against Black Americans. The movement attained further prominence following the May police killing of a Black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis. In 2017, a federal judge ruled that neither McKesson nor the Black Lives Matter movement as a whole could be sued over the Baton Rouge incident. The officer appealed and in 2019 the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived the claim against McKesson, who then appealed to the Supreme Court. The 5th Circuit left in place the judge's ruling dismissing Black Lives Matter from the case. President Trump will declare victory on election night if it appears that he is “ahead” in early results, even if not enough ballots have been counted for observers to formally declare a winner, Axios reported on Monday.
Trump has privately discussed the possibility of announcing victory prematurely, three people familiar with the conversations told Axios. The strategy would hinge on Trump gaining leads in states such as Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, or Iowa. After declaring victory, Trump would then claim that any mail-in vote received after November 3 would be invalid. This would delegitimize some votes received in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, whose supreme court has ruled that mail-in ballots may be received up to November 6 as long as they are postmarked by election day. With mail-in voters favoring Joe Biden, Trump’s team is planning to declare that the Pennsylvania election is “stolen” if ballots received after election day help the Democratic nominee win the race. Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh denied the report on the strategy. “This is nothing but people trying to create doubt about a Trump victory,” Murtaugh told Axios. “When he wins, he’s going to say so.” Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller commented that the president “will be re-elected handily and no amount of post-election Democratic thievery will be able to change the results.” A win in Pennsylvania is considered crucial for both candidates to build a victory in the electoral college. President Trump shocked Democrats by winning the state in 2016, and has sought to keep Biden from retaking the state by highlighting the Democratic nominee’s promises to end fracking and “transition” away from the oil industry. Meanwhile, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney has called on residents to be patient on Election Day and during the vote count. Pennsylvania law prohibits mail-in ballots from being counted until after polls close at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, meaning that a full count could take “several days” because of a record number of mail-in ballots for this election. Printing in China. When President Donald Trump talks about polling, his focus is very much on survey-takers that he thinks are good for him. Polls that show him trailing Joe Biden — virtually all national polls — are simply “fake news.”
The president’s blinkered view has created something of an alternate universe, one not governed by polling averages or independent analysis but by declarative statements that, at times, feel as if they are coming out of nowhere. Recently, Trump proclaimed on Twitter that he was “winning BIG in all of the polls that matter.” Such polls seem to boil down to Rasmussen Reports, which consistently — and in isolation — has a rosier picture for the president nationally than other surveys do, and the Trafalgar Group, which has had better numbers for Trump in Midwestern states. His choose-your-own-adventure approach to polling that has shown little understanding of data science, and his pronouncements have come as his advisers are trying to take in serious polling and data analysis to make sense of what the electorate voting in 2020 will look like. It has been a hallmark of Trump’s public commentary since the first time he ran for president that he treats polling as rigged against him if it isn’t favorable for him. Despite his campaign spending $10 million over the last two years on some of the most sophisticated data available, the president prefers to use what he sees on the news. And he treats voter support as a mystical, rather than a mathematical, proposition. Some of Trump’s advisers believe there is a wellspring of “shy” or “hidden” Trump voters — predominantly whites without college educations in rural areas — who are either not candid with pollsters about their choice for president, or aren’t responsive to pollsters at all. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, gave his own view of how polling works to Fox News, trumpeting “big data modeling” over old-fashioned phone calling. “I speak to all my state directors,” said Kushner, who has positioned himself as the leader of the Trump campaign, although he is not in fact the campaign manager, adding, “I do believe that polling with phones to people is an obsolete method, especially in the era of cancel culture. You’ve got a lot of snake oil salesmen who have kind of been in the business for a long time and they do this.” He concluded, “They were all completely wrong last time, and they didn’t make any modifications going forward.” That is not quite true: Although many state polls proved very wrong in 2016, the national polls that projected Hillary Clinton narrowly winning the most votes were close to the mark, and many polling outfits did make modifications, weighting, for instance, for educational backgrounds. Complaining that polls are “skewed” against Republicans has been a vocal pastime of Republican candidates for several election cycles, reaching a high pitch in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the party’s presidential nominee. Officials continue to claim in 2020 that the public polling is wrong because they’re “skewed” against Trump, overweighting Democrats in the samples. Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies, said that incumbents usually ended up “on Election Day with a ballot share that is within a point or two of their October job approval score.” In Trump’s case, his average approval score is 45%, according to Real Clear Politics. The Trump campaign has spent years and presumably millions of dollars engaging white voters without college educations who are eligible to vote but did not vote in 2016. There are almost 1.5 million such potential voters in Michigan and more than 2 million in Pennsylvania. But at the end of the day, much of the “hidden” vote stays hidden — that’s why voter turnout isn’t ever 100%, Blizzard said. Beyond the polling, the fundamentals shaping the electorate, like the economy and the record-breaking coronavirus surge, are “increasingly ominous” for Trump, said Liam Donovan, a veteran Republican strategist. Visit shopping bag printing homepage for more details. “Ironically, the polls may be the best thing the Trump campaign has going for it at this point,” he said. While Trump makes polling a punchline, both his campaign and the Republican National Committee rely on data to decide where to allocate resources. One of the murkiest issues is modeling for which voters will turn out during a pandemic and an economic downturn. And the Trump campaign has kept polling data one of its deepest secrets since leaked internal polling early in the campaign prompted a shake-up of the polling team. The campaign has been using various analyses, not all of which overlap. Traditional polling has been handled by Republican pollsters Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin, who were hired when Brad Parscale, the previous campaign manager, was running the effort; Parscale’s deputy campaign manager, former White House political director Bill Stepien, took over in July. There has also been analysis by former Cambridge Analytica official Matt Oczkowski, who is referred to as “Oz.” Kushner has held up Oczkowski’s analyses, which cut against public polling and suggest votes will break Trump’s way in the final days of the campaign, people who have heard the comments said. The amount of polling from Fabrizio and McLaughlin has dwindled in recent weeks. Instead, Stepien quietly hired another pollster, Bill Skelly, who helped create the Republican National Committee’s complex modeling for voter turnout scenarios and who is conducting data analysis for the camp, and Brock McCleary, who has worked with clients who include congressional Republicans. McCleary’s estimates of Trump’s poll standing are less “negative” than some other Trump pollsters, according to people close to the campaign. Parscale, who had worked fairly closely with the RNC, had envisioned continuous robust television ad spending through the year. Since he stepped aside, the Trump campaign, which has far less money than advisers had once anticipated, has slashed its television spending. Exactly what data has driven the allocation of the campaign’s remaining ad spending is unclear. Two Republicans said that from the time Parscale was demoted until a meeting a few weeks ago, the campaign had not reviewed RNC data that tracks specific voters and the likelihood they will support the president. That meeting was convened by Kushner to get the campaign and the RNC to work together more effectively. Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, denied that was the case, and a spokesman for the RNC said the organizations were working effectively together. The RNC turnout models vary by state, but in some scenarios, it shows Trump performing worse than he does in the campaign’s own polls, two people briefed on the numbers said. Nonetheless, that meeting led to a final $26 million television allocation led by the RNC. Whether the weeks without a unified front between the campaign and the party committee will have been a significant factor in the outcome of the race remains to be seen. And whether the “hidden” voters the Trump team has sought matters more than a few percentage points is also unclear. |
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