The company that created ChatGPT was thrown into turmoil Monday after Microsoft hired its ousted CEO and many employees threatened to follow him in a conflict that centered in part on how to build artificial intelligence that’s smarter than humans.

The developments followed a weekend of drama that shocked the AI field and fueled speculation about the future of OpenAI, which named a new chief executive on Friday and then replaced her on Sunday. The newest CEO vowed to investigate the firing of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, who’s been instrumental in OpenAI’s transformation from a nonprofit research laboratory into a world-renowned commercial startup that inaugurated the era of generative artificial intelligence.

Microsoft, which has been a close partner of the company and invested billions of dollars in it, announced that Altman and OpenAI’s former president, Greg Brockman, would lead its new advanced AI research team. Brockman, also an OpenAI co-founder, quit in protest after Altman was fired.

Hundreds of OpenAI employees, including other top executives, threatened to join them at Microsoft in an open letter addressed to OpenAI’s four-member board that called for the board’s resignation and Altman’s return.

“If the architects and vision and brains behind these products have now left, the company will be a shell of what it once was,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute. “All of that brain trust going to Microsoft will then mean that these impressive tools will be coming out of Microsoft. It will be hard to see OpenAI continue to thrive as a company.”

File – Sam Altman participates in a discussion during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in San Francisco. The board of ChatGPT-maker Open AI says it has pushed out Altman, its co-founder and CEO, and replaced him with an interim CEO. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Eric Risberg

FILE – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks on Nov. 15, 2023, in San Francisco. Despite a rift between the key players behind ChatGPT and the company they helped build, both former Twitch leader Emmet Shear and Nadella said they are committed to a partnership. Microsoft snapped up Sam Altman and another architect of ChatGPT maker OpenAI for a new venture after their sudden departures shocked the artificial intelligence world. It’s also left OpenAI’s new CEO to paper over tensions by vowing to investigate Altman’s firing. The developments come Monday, Nov. 20, 2023 after a weekend of drama and speculation about how the power dynamics would shake out at OpenAI. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, file)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Eric Risberg

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was “extremely excited” to bring on the pair and looked “forward to getting to know” the new management team at OpenAI.

Altman later said on X that his top priority with Nadella is to ensure that OpenAI “continues to thrive” and that it is committed to “fully providing continuity of operations to our partners and customers.”

OpenAI said Friday that Altman was pushed out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors, which had lost confidence in his ability to lead the company.

In an X post Monday, OpenAI’s new interim chief executive, Emmett Shear, said he would hire an independent investigator to look into Altman’s ouster and write a report within 30 days.

“It’s clear that the process and communications around Sam’s removal” were handled “very badly,” wrote Shear, who co-founded Twitch, an Amazon-owned livestreaming service popular with video gamers.

He said he also plans in the next month to “reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures.” After that, Shear said, he would “drive changes in the organization,” including “significant governance changes if necessary.”

Originally started as a nonprofit, and still governed as one, OpenAI’s stated mission is to safely build AI that is “generally smarter than humans.” Debates have swirled around that goal and whether it conflicts with the company’s increasing commercial success.

The reason behind the board’s removal of Altman was not a “specific disagreement on safety,” nor does the board oppose commercialization of AI models, Shear said.

OpenAI last week declined to answer questions about Altman’s alleged lack of candor. The company’s statement said his behavior was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.

A key driver of the shakeup, OpenAI’s co-founder, chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever, expressed regrets for his participation in the ouster.

“I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company,” he said Monday on X.

The open letter began circulating Monday. According to a copy obtained by The Associated Press, the number of signatures amounted to a majority of the company’s 770 employees. The AP was not able to independently confirm that all of the signatures were from OpenAI employees.

“Everyone at @OpenAI is united,” one of the signatories, research scientist Noam Brown, said on X. “This is not a civil war. Unless Sam and Greg are brought back, there will be no OpenAI left to govern.”

The letter alleged that after Altman’s firing, the company’s remaining executive team had recommended that the board resign and be replaced with a “qualified board” that could stabilize the company. But the board resisted and said allowing OpenAI to be destroyed would be consistent with its mission, according to the letter.

OpenAI has said since its 2015 founding that its goal is to advance AI in a way that benefits all humanity.

A company spokesperson confirmed that the board received the letter.

Microsoft declined to comment on the letter.

After Altman was pushed out, he stirred speculation about coming back into the fold in a series of tweets. He posted a selfie with an OpenAI guest pass Sunday, saying this is “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”

Hours earlier, he tweeted, “i love the openai team so much,” which drew heart replies from Brockman and Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who was initially named as interim CEO.

It’s not clear what transpired between the announcement of Murati’s interim role Friday and Shear’s hiring, though she was among several employees Monday who tweeted, “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” Altman replied to many with heart emojis.

The board consists of Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. None of them responded to calls or emails seeking comment. Because of its nonprofit structure, the board differs from most startup boards that are typically led by investors.

Altman helped catapult ChatGPT to global fame based on its ability to respond to questions and produce human-like passages of text in a seemingly natural way.

In the past year, he has become Silicon Valley’s most in-demand voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, he went on a world tour to meet with government officials, drawing big crowds at public events as he discussed the risks of AI and attempts to regulate the emerging technology.

But as money poured into OpenAI this year, helping to advance its development of more capable AI, it also brought more conflict around whether that fast pace of commercialization fit with the startup’s founding vision, said Kreps, the Cornell University professor. But rather than slow that pace, Altman’s ouster may simply shift it out of OpenAI.

Altman “really has a walk-on-water aura, and I think a lot of it is well deserved,” Kreps said. “He’s the one who has attracted the investment, and he’ll do that wherever it is.”

Microsoft’s shares rose 2% on Monday and hit an all-time high.

The AP and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to part of the AP’s text archives.

___

Associated Press writers Brian P. D. Hannon in Bangkok and Haleluya Hadero in New York contributed to this report.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Microsoft on Monday hired two leading executives from the company that created ChatGPT after one of them was abruptly fired by OpenAI, the startup whose chatbot kicked off the era of generative artificial intelligence.

The developments followed a weekend of drama that shocked the AI field and fueled speculation about the future of OpenAI, which named a new chief executive on Friday and then replaced her on Sunday. The newest CEO vowed to investigate the firing of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, one of the world’s most sought-after experts on AI.

Microsoft, which has been a close partner of the company and invested billions of dollars in it, announced that Altman and OpenAI’s former president, Greg Brockman, would lead its new advanced AI research team. Brockman, also an OpenAI co-founder, quit in protest after Altman was fired.

Many more OpenAI employees threatened to join them at Microsoft in an open letter addressed to OpenAI’s board that called for its resignation and Altman’s return.

“If the architects and vision and brains behind these products have now left, the company will be a shell of what it once was,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute. “All of that brain trust going to Microsoft will then mean that these impressive tools will be coming out of Microsoft. It will be hard to see OpenAI continue to thrive as a company.”

File – Sam Altman participates in a discussion during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in San Francisco. The board of ChatGPT-maker Open AI says it has pushed out Altman, its co-founder and CEO, and replaced him with an interim CEO. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Eric Risberg

FILE – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks on Nov. 15, 2023, in San Francisco. Despite a rift between the key players behind ChatGPT and the company they helped build, both former Twitch leader Emmet Shear and Nadella said they are committed to a partnership. Microsoft snapped up Sam Altman and another architect of ChatGPT maker OpenAI for a new venture after their sudden departures shocked the artificial intelligence world. It’s also left OpenAI’s new CEO to paper over tensions by vowing to investigate Altman’s firing. The developments come Monday, Nov. 20, 2023 after a weekend of drama and speculation about how the power dynamics would shake out at OpenAI. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, file)

Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS/Eric Risberg

PreviousNext

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he was “extremely excited” to bring on the pair and looked “forward to getting to know” the new management team at OpenAI.

In a reply on X, Altman said “the mission continues.” Brockman posted: “We are going to build something new & it will be incredible.”

OpenAI said Friday that Altman was pushed out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors, which had lost confidence in his ability to lead the company.

In an X post Monday, OpenAI’s new interim chief executive, Emmett Shear, said he would hire an independent investigator to look into Altman’s ouster and write a report within 30 days.

“It’s clear that the process and communications around Sam’s removal” were handled “very badly,” wrote Shear, who co-founded Twitch, an Amazon-owned livestreaming service popular with video gamers.

He said he also plans in the next month to “reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force” and speak with employees, investors and customers.

After that, Shear said he would “drive changes in the organization,” including “significant governance changes if necessary.”

He noted that the reason behind the board removing Altman was not a “specific disagreement on safety.” Originally started as a nonprofit, and still governed as one, OpenAI’s stated mission is to safely build AI that is “generally smarter than humans.” Debates have swirled around that goal and whether it conflicts with the company’s increasing commercial success.

OpenAI last week declined to answer questions about Altman’s alleged lack of candor. Its statement said his behavior was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.

A key driver of the shakeup, OpenAI’s co-founder, chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever, expressed regrets for his participation in the ouster.

“I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company,” he said Monday on X.

Hundreds of OpenAI employees signed a letter that began circulating early Monday calling for the board’s resignation and Altman’s return and threatening to follow Altman and Brockman to Microsoft, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Associated Press.

The copy showed that the number of signatures amounted to a majority of the company’s 770 employees. The AP was not able to independently confirm that all of the signatures were from OpenAI employees.

“Everyone at @OpenAI is united,” one of the signatories, research scientist Noah Brown, said on X. “This is not a civil war. Unless Sam and Greg are brought back, there will be no OpenAI left to govern.”

A company spokesperson confirmed that the board received the letter.

Microsoft declined to comment on the letter.

After Altman was pushed out, he stirred speculation about coming back into the fold in a series of tweets. He posted a selfie with an OpenAI guest pass Sunday, saying this is “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”

Hours earlier, he tweeted, “i love the openai team so much,” which drew heart replies from Brockman and Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who was initially named as interim CEO.

It’s not clear what transpired between the announcement of Murati’s interim role Friday and Shear’s hiring, though she was among several employees Monday who tweeted, “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” Altman replied to many with heart emojis.

The board consists of Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. None were able to be reached for comment.

Shear said he took the new job because he believes “that OpenAI is one of the most important companies currently in existence.”

On a podcast in June, Shear said he’s generally optimistic about AI but has serious concerns about building something “a lot smarter than us” and whether doing so could endanger humans.

That’s an issue that Altman consistently faced after helping catapult ChatGPT to global fame based on its ability to respond to questions and produce human-like passages of text in a seemingly natural way.

In the past year, he has become Silicon Valley’s most in-demand voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, he went on a world tour to meet with government officials, drawing big crowds at public events as he discussed the risks of AI and attempts to regulate the emerging technology.

But as money poured into OpenAI this year, helping to advance its development of more capable AI, it also brought more conflict around whether that fast pace of commercialization fit with the startup’s founding vision, said Kreps, the Cornell University professor. But rather than slow that pace, Altman’s ouster may simply shift it out of OpenAI.

Altman “really has a walk-on-water aura, and I think a lot of it is well deserved,” Kreps said. “He’s the one who has attracted the investment, and he’ll do that wherever it is.”

Microsoft’s shares rose nearly 2% before the opening bell and were nearing an all-time high Monday.

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to part of the AP’s text archives.

___

Associated Press writers Brian P. D. Hannon in Bangkok and Haleluya Hadero in New York contributed to this report.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

The post Microsoft hires 2 main executives from firm that created ChatGPT appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

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VentureBeat sat down (virtually) last week with Ritesh Agrawal, CEO and co-founder of Airgap Networks to get insights on how he and his team are building one of the most innovative startups in the cybersecurity industry.

Agrawal leads a team of professionals who have developed successful infrastructure products for the carrier, industrial and enterprise sectors. He has more than 20 years of experience in network, security and cloud solutions. Under Agrawal’s leadership, Airgap Networks has achieved several milestones, including winning three prestigious Global InfoSec Awards at the RSA Conference in 2023.

The following is an edited excerpt from VentureBeat’s interview with Ritesh Agrawal:

VentureBeat: Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got into the cybersecurity industry?

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Ritesh Agrawal: I have a background as head of Juniper’s network security business where I focused primarily on telcos and large enterprises. I realized that the industry was losing the cybersecurity battle as security infrastructure spending increased each year, yet security breaches and damages continued to increase. Realizing the need for a more sustainable solution, I saw an opportunity to apply VC-led innovation to the industry.

And that always starts with a transformative architecture, not just a new feature set. We have observed the effectiveness of mobile/telecom architecture in stopping the spread of malware, even if a device is infected, at a fraction of the cost of enterprise offerings. The name “Airgap” comes from our commitment to offer that same level of perfect isolation, protection and cost-efficiency to all businesses across IT and OT.

VB: As CEO of Airgap, what insights have you gained about the cybersecurity industry?

Agrawal: First, the threat landscape is incredibly dynamic, so only the most agile organizations will adapt and thrive. This is why there are so many successful startups in cybersecurity – larger companies find it difficult to innovate as fast as attackers, and customers cannot afford to fall behind.

For example, Airgap has six major patents with more [pending] Recognition, and we’ve just won three major innovation awards at RSAC, as our customers rely on us to stay ahead of them as the threat landscape changes.

Second, to aim high. This is a busy space with many competing solutions, so incremental innovation and feature polishing won’t crowd out incumbents. I’ve always believed that as a startup you should deliver a whole new architecture, not just a product, or you shouldn’t bring it to market.

In closing, I’d like to try to internalize that any network security team is really overwhelmed with time and budget these days. You need quick, easy wins that don’t require new skills. Simplification and fast time-to-value are a business game changer. Don’t automate complex security processes—eliminate them with better architecture. With Airgap, for example, we haven’t just made traditional network segmentation “simpler,” it’s just gone.

VB: How do you see the threat landscape evolving over the next few years?

Agrawal: Attacks are becoming more sophisticated. For example, social engineering attacks using a combination of AI and the wealth of information online about us and our employers will penalize networks that lack strong authentication and identity controls.

State actors and crime-as-a-service are likely to play a bigger role, and that means more attacks that don’t target ransomware but do significant damage to core networks and assets.

It’s part of a larger trend that I think signals the end of perimeter-based security thinking and, in many ways, the end of the aging core network architecture itself. And why customers like Flex, Tillys and Kingston Technologies are actively adopting Airgap as their viable architecture for mission-critical infrastructure.

VB: What should cybersecurity leaders do to stay ahead of this curve?

Agrawal: First, recognize the need to prioritize protecting mission-critical networks, assets, and identities with a defensible network architecture. Everyone has their own unique “crown jewels”. They control the business and operational processes that must remain secure even if security breaches occur elsewhere in the network. And that’s airgap.

A perimeter-based firewall architecture is not enough, and I’m happy to discuss this with any firewall vendor. Everyone spends more and gets hurt more often; That’s not what winning looks like.

Second, aggressively drive trust and attack surfaces out of your network. Establish zero-trust segmentation between your mission-critical infrastructure and your standard corporate IT network, as well as for all devices on shared networks, to ensure threats cannot spread. And bridge the gap between identity and endpoint protection with a dedicated secure access solution, because traditional VPN solutions don’t eliminate the old trusted connections that attackers know how to crack.

And you can’t back up something you don’t know or can’t find, so leverage network-centric asset discovery and intelligence like Airgap, designed for low latency and zero network congestion.

And third, prioritize cybersecurity solutions that don’t require heart surgery for your running network. Apply this litmus test to any security vendor: Tell me what changes need to be made to my network, tech stack, or infrastructure? How much training do I need? How long it will take? Airgap deploys in hours, which is great for time-to-value, but more importantly, because there is so little exposure to the running network. Any solution that forces device upgrades, network re-addressing, ACL/NAC changes, or network downtime of more than a few microseconds should be seriously avoided.

VB: Why are OT networks the focus of attackers and what special precautions should OT network owners take?

Agrawal: OT networks were not originally designed for security, but for speed and scalability. OT networks have long lifecycles, are rarely patched, and are used extensively by vendors and remote support engineers. You often have far too many devices sharing the same network segment. They’re filled with old Windows servers and headless devices, so all the agent-based solutions designed for enterprise IT networks just don’t work. It’s like Swiss security cheese, but for many OT networks, it can be more holes than cheese.

The very first thing I recommend for OT network owners is to create a dedicated layer of visibility and control (we call it the Airgap) between your corporate IT network and your core/OT network. The Airgap Zero Trust Firewall, ZTFW for short, prevents threats from spreading from IT to the core network and vice versa, so that operational security can be maintained even if higher network layers are compromised.

Airgap ZTFW relies on three essential functions to secure this dedicated layer. The first is agentless segmentation due to the prevalence of legacy Windows servers and headless machines. The second is secure access with full MFA (multi-factor authentication) for your remote engineers and technicians, as VPNs are far too trusting. And the third is network-based asset intelligence with accurate, real-time inventory, as OT networks are very dynamic.

VB: Once a company fully segments and secures access to its network, how does asset intelligence help protect it?

Agrawal: Staying secure and compliant on Day 2 and beyond is a major concern for the industry. Before Airgap started providing same-day segmentation, companies put in six months or more of hard work inventorying and segmenting their network, only to see it fall apart again the next day.

First, consider that real networks are highly dynamic. Whether the changes were caused by acquisitions, new locations, refreshes, or just mobile devices being moved between floors, most businesses don’t have a clear idea of ​​what they have or where it is located. It all starts with real-time accuracy, and that means the network.

Prioritize solutions that leverage network context and network behavior analysis while ensuring low latency and zero network congestion, which were key design goals for Airgap with our ZTFW. Insist on systems that provide a complete view of every traffic flow, including lateral traffic flows. Don’t settle for systems with extensive packet inspection and polling, as they can overload easily congested networks.

VB: Airgap just announced ThreatGPT, a ChatGPT integration with the Airgap Zero Trust Firewall. What does this mean for customers, and where do you think AI-powered cybersecurity is headed?

Agrawal: We are very excited about ThreatGPT. Because we set up full micro-segmentation, we have a wealth of information about the network, assets, and traffic history. Because ThreatGPT is fully integrated into the core of the ZTFW architecture, you can use any available data to train the models and I believe we’re the first to bring this to market.

ThreatGPT, based on the GPT 3.5 architecture, offers customers the data mining intelligence of AI combined with a simple, natural language interface. It’s pretty stunning; It will find risks anywhere on your network just by typing in simple questions.

For the future, I see AI more as a driver of human productivity and not as a replacement for human intelligence. I’m happy that Airgap is the market leader here – it’s a game changer in terms of risk management.

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This story originally appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of Guitar Aficionado magazine.

Albert King was a giant among bluesmen, and not only for his immense talents on the guitar. A 250-pound giant of considerable bulk, King stood between six-four and six-seven and made any guitar he held in his massive hands look like a child’s plaything.

But the notes and tones he tore from the instrument were anything but small. In the middle years of the 20th century, King grabbed hold of a Gibson Flying V and boldly went where no blues guitar player had gone before, or has gone since.

A left-hander, he flipped a right-handed guitar upside down, put it in an unorthodox tuning, and forged a style steeped in steely drama and epic note-bends that evoke the vertiginous blood rush of powerful emotions.

King’s impact on the blues and rock guitar legacy is prodigious. Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan have been among his greatest admirers. Each drafted huge chunks of King’s fiercely original style into his own playing. Clapton famously nicked the solo from King’s Oh, Pretty Woman and inserted it in Strange Brew from Cream’s wildly influential 1967 album, Disraeli Gears.

Jimi Hendrix cited King’s Crosscut Saw as one of his favorite tunes. Mike Bloomfield covered King’s Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong, and Cream recorded their own version of King’s signature tune, Born Under a Bad Sign. As for Stevie Ray Vaughan, he outdid his King-crazed predecessors by recording an In Session television special with his hero in 1983.

His influence on many of the world’s most revered guitarists is sufficient to make him a national treasure of American music. But in many ways, his own achievements outshine those of his acolytes. After all, he did it first. And he certainly did it his way.

True to his name, King is arguably the monarch of upside-down-lefty guitarists, a distinguished company that includes Otis Rush, Doyle Bramhall II, Elizabeth Cotten, and Coco Montoya in the blues-folk realm, and everyone from Babyface to Bob Geldof in other genres.

The barbed-wire minimalism of King’s searing leads makes an ideal counterpoint to his husky, gospel-inflected vocal style. It’s a true call-and-response passion play. King was nicknamed the Velvet Bulldozer, a name that resonates once you realize that he once made his living driving a bulldozer. Albert King lived the blues. That’s why he played and sang them so beautifully.

He had a remarkably wide perspective on the blues as well, crossbreeding more traditional 12-bar forms with everything from sweet Stax soul to big-band balladry.

Like a lot of left-hand/right-brain creatives, Albert King didn’t play by any rulebook but his own, nor would he suffer fools gladly. Possessed of a notoriously bad temper, he would lay into band members onstage if things weren’t going his way. In one famous public display of anger, he chewed out John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, who were backing him, for playing too loud.

(Image credit: David Warner Ellis/Redferns)

Luthier Dan Erlewine, who made King one of the Flying V guitars that he played throughout his career, had a few occasions to witness the Velvet Bulldozer in high dudgeon.

“The first time Albert was playing at the Grande Ballroom, I was backstage after the show,” Erlewine says, referring to Detroit’s legendary Sixties rock venue, just a few miles from the bridge to Windsor, Ontario. “And Albert was pissed at the promoters, who were trying to pay him with Canadian bills. He wouldn’t take them. ‘I don’t want none of that funny money,’ he said. And they got him what he wanted.”

King was known to pack a gun, so people were reluctant to cross him. But his hot temper was only one aspect of a complex and gifted artist. Erlewine puts the anger down to a combination of impatience and competitiveness. 

“I’d say Albert was more competitive than some, certainly more so than the older folks out there, like [his blues contemporaries] Mance Lipscomb and Johnny Shines. As a person, though, Albert had a softness and kindness inside. But he kept it hidden a lot.”

Along with B.B. and Freddie, Albert King is one of the three kings of the blues, although the man born Albert Nelson was related to neither of those great bluesmen by blood. He was, however, born in B.B. King’s hometown – Indianola, Mississippi – on April 25, 1923. 

While he may not have literally been born under a bad sign, his birth date does put Albert King in the contentious and creative zodiacal house of Taurus. Later in life, he would assume the regal surname King as a stage name, some say in homage to B.B. King.

King’s family moved to Forrest City, Arkansas, when he was eight. He spent some time as an agricultural laborer, picking cotton, but set his sights on making a life for himself in music early on. He once joked that he didn’t learn from studying any other guitarists, saying, “Everything I do is wrong.” But that isn’t strictly accurate. King also spoke often of being influenced by Lonnie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Elmore James.

“I listened to the slide guitar of Elmore James and a couple of more people I knew way back there,” he told one interviewer. “Then along came T-Bone Walker, and that did it. So I just mixed it all together, and I couldn’t get it exactly like they had it, but I just put my own thing to it.”

It may have been the open slide-guitar tunings of players like Jefferson and James that inspired King’s own use of alternate tunings. He is mainly associated with an E minor tuning (low to high, C B E G B E). But he also tuned to the same intervals in both C# and D. He was known to use open F (low to high, C F C D A D) as well.

For guitarists accustomed to playing in standard, none of these tunings are as intuitive as, say, open G or E. But remember that Albert King was holding a right-handed electric guitar the “wrong” way around. This yields a different perspective on the instrument, one that is, in a way, more in tune with nature, with the low strings closer to the ground and the high strings nearer to the sky. But even upside down, some of King’s open tunings are mighty strange, which also accounts for the unique beauty embodied in some of his phrasing.

“I knew I was going to have to create my own style,” he told guitar journalist Dan Forte, “because I couldn’t make the changes and chords the same as a right-handed man could. I play a few chords, but not many. I always concentrated on my singing guitar sound – more of a sustained note.”

(Image credit: David Redfern/Redferns)

King also enjoyed what’s known as the “lefty advantage” when it comes to bending notes. With the strings’ vertical arrangement flipped, you bend notes on the critical higher-pitched strings by pulling the string downward, which is much easier than pushing upward to execute a bend. 

King exploited this capacity to particularly dramatic effect, sometimes bending notes as much as four tones up. His huge hands were another factor in this aspect of his style, as was the slackness of the strings in the low-slung tunings King favored.

As if all this weren’t unconventional enough, King didn’t use a pick. He mainly used his thumb to pluck the notes. But his first finger would also sometimes come into play in helping shape the steely pinched tones that are another hallmark of his style.

“I never could hold a pick in my hand,” King explained to Forte. “I had started out playing with one, but I’d be really gettin’ into it, and after a while the pick would sail across the room. I said, ‘To hell with this.’ So I just play with the meat of the thumb.”

The core elements of King’s riveting style are all evident, albeit embryonically, on his first recording, Bad Luck Blues, recorded in Chicago in 1953 for Parrot Records. 

By the time he cut this disc, King had paid plenty of dues, singing lead tenor with gospel quartet the Harmony Kings, fronting his own group – the Groove Boys – in Osceola, Arkansas, and playing drums for seminal blues guitarist and singer Jimmy Reed. But Bad Luck Blues lived up to its name by not providing King with the hit he might have been hoping for.

King didn’t score big until eight years later, when he released Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong in 1961. The record climbed to Number 14 on the R&B charts and put him on the map. It also became a featured track on his very first album, The Big Blues, in 1962.  

A study in pinched, plucked passion, the lead guitar intro to Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong makes it clear from the start that Albert King ain’t about to do things in a small way. 

This is the lowdown slow blues at its finest, and the guitar-and-vocal interplay is exquisite. King’s biting leads alternate with a vocal performance that scales the full emotional range, from a mournful croon to a high-pitched gospel wail. The symbiotic relationship between King’s guitar and voice is one of the blues’ greatest treasures.

By the time the disc was released, King had found his instrument: a 1958 korina wood Gibson Flying V. There has been much speculation as to why he favored this particular guitar, but upside-down lefties tend to seek out instruments with symmetrically shaped bodies and headstocks, as they look much less awkward when flipped. And among symmetrically shaped guitars, a Flying V certainly has far more flash and panache than, say, an SG or 335. 

Along with Lonnie Mack, King was one of the earliest guitarists to popularize Gibson’s angular, V-shaped masterpiece.

(Image credit: Jordi Vidal/Redferns)

Like many archetypal bluesmen, King was often on the move, particularly in the early phases of his career. By 1966, he was down in Memphis and had been signed to Stax, the premier mid-Sixties R&B label, then riding high with hits by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd, and Wilson Pickett. 

The marriage of King’s 12-bar blues with the funky Stax backbeat is a true revelation on his 1967 hit, Born Under a Bad Sign. On it, he is supported solidly by Booker T. & the MGs and the Memphis Horns as well as Isaac Hayes, whose piano vamp sets the groove strutting at a pimp-crawlin’ pace. 

The deep, dark Memphis Horns reinforce the driving bass line, and funky off-beats walk up to the V chord. King’s guitar sounds crisper and more incisive than ever, his voice plumbing the desperate depths of this ultimate hard-luck narrative.

Stax had one of the greatest-sounding recording rooms of the period as well as a brilliant pool of staff musicians, producers and tunesmiths, including Hayes and Booker T. & the MGs – consisting of organist Booker T. Jones, guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Duck Dunn, and drummer Al Jackson Jr. 

It was at Stax that King’s maverick talent found an ideal home. His Stax years yielded the lion’s share of his signature recordings, including Laundromat Blues, Crosscut Saw, Personal Manager, and As the Years Go Passing By, all of which were collected on King’s first album for Stax, also titled Born Under a Bad Sign.

This was a new sound in the blues – urgently contemporary, no mere exercise in the kind of purist reconstructionism that had come into vogue at the time. The Stax tracks helped King cross over to a wider audience than he’d ever reached before.

By this point, his original 1958 Flying V had gone missing, allegedly lost by the guitarist in a game of craps. It was replaced by a 1966 Flying V presented to King by Gibson. This instrument accompanied the guitarist onto the stage for his many appearances at Bill Graham’s legendary Fillmore venues in San Francisco and New York City. 

These shows found King sharing bills with rock and blues titans like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, the Allman Brothers Band, Van Morrison and B.B. King. After years of hard work, Albert King found an appreciative audience among the era’s blues-crazed rock fans.

One of these incendiary Fillmore nights was captured on King’s seminal live album Live Wire/Blues Power. In many ways, King is best understood through his live recordings. The spontaneity and uninhibited abandon of live performance, as compared with studio recordings, seemed particularly suited to the man’s blues muse.

But one aspect of King’s work that typically drew a puzzled response from his new young fans was his love of schmaltzy balladry. His cover of the American songbook standard The Very Thought of You that closes Born Under a Bad Sign was easily the disc’s most frequently skipped-over track. It probably still is, for that matter. But King refused to conform to anyone’s notion of what he, or the blues, should be. 

(Image credit: David Redfern/Redferns)

In 1969, he performed with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Why shouldn’t a bluesman have full symphonic backing? Albert King was the first to go there. And why shouldn’t a bluesman record an album of Elvis Presley covers, should the mood take him? King went there too with 1970’s Blues for Elvis: King Does the King’s Things.

In the early Seventies, King acquired his third iconic Flying V, the instrument custom-built by Dan Erlewine. This was his only truly left-handed guitar, with the tone controls and output jack on what would be the lower bout for King. With his previous, flipped-over right-handed Vs, the volume tone controls were awkwardly located on the upper bout. 

Erlewine recalls King mentioning that it was annoying for him to reach up to adjust his tone or volume. “That was one of the reasons he wanted a lefty,” he explains. “He also wanted his name on the fretboard in pearl and abalone, so it would flash under the lights.”

Fashioned from a 125-year-old piece of black walnut, this guitar would be King’s main ax from 1972 until his passing, 20 years later. ’72 was an especially good year for King, witnessing the release of another landmark recording, I’ll Play the Blues for You, a soulful minor-key outing much in the vein of B.B. King’s The Thrill Is Gone. 

On I’ll Play the Blues for You – both the song and entire album of the same name – King is backed by members of two other great Stax outfits, the Bar-Kays and Isaac Hayes’ backing group, the Movement.

King stuck with Stax throughout the company’s decline in the early Seventies, moving on to several other labels after the company went bankrupt in 1975. 

His Seventies recordings didn’t have quite the same impact as his Sixties work, although there are some fine tracks to be discovered among the 10 or so albums that King released between 1970 and 1978. And while King remained active as a recording and touring artist throughout the Seventies, he began to slow down in the Eighties, moving into semiretirement from the studio but continuing to play select festivals and other live dates. 

Constant touring under far less than five-star circumstances was one of the things said to exacerbate the guitarist’s irritability and bad temper. But one very important gig he was able to perform – and which seemed to put him in quite a good mood – was a 1983 date with Stevie Ray Vaughan for the Canadian music television series In Session. 

It is a true passing-the-torch moment, two guitar legends from very different generations seated comfortably side by side and trading licks on blues standards and some of their own most-loved tracks. Vaughan’s admiration for his six-string idol is palpable, and King really shines in this welcoming environment. The DVD document of the performance is highly recommended.

Fortunately, and unlike many of his peers, King lived to see his work embraced by several generations of blues and rock guitarists. How much this meant to the irascible bluesman is hard to say. 

At times he seemed more interested in going fishing and smoking his pipe, two of his favorite leisure-time pursuits. But he was a road warrior to the last: Albert King died of a heart attack on December 21, 1992, at age 69. He’d played his last show two days earlier, in Los Angeles.

Albert (left) and B.B. King, seated together backstage in Cleveland, Ohio on February 20, 1991 (Image credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

It was fitting that the Memphis Horns, who had backed King on some of his greatest musical triumphs, accompanied his body on its journey down Beale Street and across the Mississippi River to King’s final resting place in Edmondson, Arkansas.

They played When the Saints Go Marching In. One likes to think that SRV, Hendrix, Bloomfield and many of King’s other gone-beyond acolytes were lined up to greet him at the Pearly Gates – or whatever serves as the musicians’ entrance to heaven.

The post Customized Flying Vs, unusual open tunings and large bends: how Albert King created his personal pressure of the blues – and impressed Hendrix, Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Elon Musk became CEO of Twitter in October and made drastic changes in a matter of months. He fired scores of employees, including top executives and the team responsible for monitoring the service for inappropriate and abusive content or accounts. Employees who stayed with the company had to meet crazy schedules and, in some cases, cater to Musk’s whims, such as his desire to give his own tweets more visibility.

Twitter has experienced frequent technical glitches in recent weeks and has become a breeding ground for fake accounts and bots. The platform is also increasingly becoming the home of trolling and hateful content and “no one cares,” an engineer at the company told the BBC.

“For someone inside, it’s like a building with all parts on fire,” an unidentified BBC Twitter worker said as part of an investigation released on Monday.

The employee revealed that the San Francisco-based social media company is in a state of chaos and many of the people responsible for creating and maintaining its security features, which curbed 60% of Twitter’s trolling, have been fired.

“From the outside the facade looks good, but I can see that nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything,” the clerk said. Because Twitter is understaffed, employees from other teams are forced to do extra work that isn’t their responsibility.

“A completely new person, without the expertise, is doing what more than 20 people used to do,” the BBC official said. “That leaves room for a lot more risk, a lot more opportunity for things to go wrong.”

Even on the content security front, many features designed to protect users no longer work the way they did before Musk became the “chief chump” because nobody’s assigned to them.

Lisa Jennings Young was Twitter’s head of content design and responsible for rolling out security features that protected users from hateful content when she was fired after Musk’s acquisition. Her team members, who have all been fired since Musk’s takeover, had developed the “Nudge” feature, which warns users if their posts contain trigger words or hateful language.

“Overall 60% of users deleted or edited their reply when given the nudge a chance,” Jennings Young told the BBC. But now things are different.

“Right now there’s nobody around to work on it,” she said.

Amid the disorderly environment, the Twitter worker who said the company was “on fire” told the BBC that when Musk is in the office he always has two bodyguards with him like in a “Hollywood movie”. They accompany him everywhere – even to the toilet.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Musk and Twitter did not respond to the BBC’s investigation, but Musk tweeted a response to the original story.

The story goes on

More from Fortuna:

The BBC investigation is the latest to shed light on Twitter’s internal workings since Musk bought the platform for $44 billion last year. Employees have said that Twitter’s culture has taken a hit since the acquisition, as the office turned into a “ghost town” and internal communications were absent. They’ve also complained about long hours and the elimination of office perks as part of Musk’s efforts to make the social media company profitable.

Twitter’s revenue reportedly fell 35% in the fourth quarter, and on one day in January, the service had 500 fewer advertisers than on the same day last year.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

More from Fortuna:

The post Twitter engineer says layoffs created chaos and Elon Musk works within the workplace with 2 bodyguards appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Twitter has seen dramatic changes under the leadership of Elon Musk. Dimitrios Kambouris—The Met Museum/Vogue/Getty Images

Elon Musk became CEO of Twitter in October and made drastic changes in a matter of months. He fired scores of employees, including top executives and the team responsible for monitoring the service for inappropriate and abusive content or accounts. Employees who stayed with the company had to meet crazy schedules and, in some cases, cater to Musk’s whims, such as his desire to give his own tweets more exposure.

Twitter has experienced frequent technical glitches in recent weeks and has become a breeding ground for fake accounts and bots. The platform is also increasingly becoming the home of trolling and hateful content and “no one cares,” an engineer at the company told the BBC.

“For someone inside, it’s like a building with all parts on fire,” an unidentified BBC Twitter worker said as part of an investigation released on Monday.

The employee revealed that the San Francisco-based social media company is in a state of chaos and many of the people responsible for creating and maintaining its security features, which curbed 60% of Twitter’s trolling, have been fired.

“If you look at it from the outside, the facade looks good, but I can see that nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything,” the clerk said. Because Twitter is understaffed, employees from other teams are forced to do extra work that isn’t their responsibility.

“A completely new person without the expertise is doing what used to be done by 20+ people,” the staffer told the BBC. “That leaves room for a lot more risk, a lot more opportunity for things to go wrong.”

Even on the content security front, many features designed to protect users no longer work the way they did before Musk became the “chief chump” because nobody’s assigned to them.

Lisa Jennings Young was Twitter’s head of content design and responsible for rolling out security features that protected users from hateful content when she was fired after Musk’s acquisition. Her team members, who have all been fired since Musk’s takeover, had developed the “Nudge” feature, which warns users if their posts contain trigger words or hateful language.

“Overall 60% of users deleted or edited their reply when given the nudge a chance,” Jennings Young told the BBC. But now things are different.

“Right now there’s nobody around to work on it,” she said.

Amid the disordered environment, the Twitter worker who said the company was on fire told the BBC that when Musk is in the office he always has two bodyguards with him like in a “Hollywood movie”. They accompany him everywhere – even to the toilet.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Musk and Twitter did not respond to the BBC’s investigation, but Musk tweeted a response to the original story.

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Elon Musk became CEO of Twitter in October and made drastic changes in a matter of months. He fired scores of employees, including top executives and the team responsible for monitoring the service for inappropriate and abusive content or accounts. Employees who stayed with the company had to meet crazy schedules and, in some cases, cater to Musk’s whims, such as his desire to give his own tweets more visibility.

Twitter has experienced frequent technical glitches in recent weeks and has become a breeding ground for fake accounts and bots. The platform is also increasingly becoming the home of trolling and hateful content and “no one cares,” an engineer at the company told the BBC.

“For someone inside, it’s like a building with all parts on fire,” an unidentified BBC Twitter worker said as part of an investigation released on Monday.

The employee revealed that the San Francisco-based social media company is in a state of chaos and many of the people responsible for creating and maintaining its security features, which curbed 60% of Twitter’s trolling, have been fired.

“If you look at it from the outside, the facade looks good, but I can see that nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything,” the clerk said. Because Twitter is understaffed, employees from other teams are forced to do extra work that isn’t their responsibility.

“A completely new person without the expertise is doing what used to be done by 20+ people,” the staffer told the BBC. “That leaves room for a lot more risk, a lot more opportunity for things to go wrong.”

Even on the content security front, many features designed to protect users no longer work the way they did before Musk became the “chief chump” because nobody’s assigned to them.

Lisa Jennings Young was Twitter’s head of content design and responsible for rolling out security features that protected users from hateful content when she was fired after Musk’s acquisition. Her team members, who have all been fired since Musk’s takeover, had developed the “Nudge” feature, which warns users if their posts contain trigger words or hateful language.

“Overall 60% of users deleted or edited their reply when given the nudge a chance,” Jennings Young told the BBC. But now things are different.

“Right now there’s nobody around to work on it,” she said.

Amid the disordered environment, the Twitter worker who said the company was on fire told the BBC that when Musk is in the office he always has two bodyguards with him like in a “Hollywood movie”. They accompany him everywhere – even to the toilet.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Musk and Twitter did not respond to the BBC’s investigation, but Musk tweeted a response to the original story.

See more

Sorry I turned Twitter from a nurturing paradise to a place that…has trolls pic.twitter.com/HaWl1jPfOm

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2023

The BBC investigation is the latest to shed light on Twitter’s internal workings since Musk bought the platform for $44 billion last year. Employees have said that Twitter’s culture has taken a hit since the acquisition, as the office turned into a “ghost town” and with no internal communications. They’ve also complained about long hours and the elimination of office perks as part of Musk’s efforts to make the social media company profitable.

Twitter’s revenue reportedly fell 35% in the fourth quarter, and on one day in January, the service had 500 fewer advertisers than on the same day last year.

The post Elon Musk works at Twitter with 2 bodyguards and layoffs have created chaos, Twitter engineer says appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

We drove back to her house, near the beach, in the city of Santa Cruz, and Stasiewicz mused on the contrast between our settled way of life and the habits of Indigenous tribes. Native Americans had once moved around seasonally while stewarding their forests by means of controlled burns. Today, perhaps, wildfires and their evacuations are forcing people to return to a semi-nomadic existence. Stasiewicz has friends with respiratory ailments who can’t tolerate the wildfire smoke that now routinely blankets the West Coast; their new seasonal routine is to move to the East Coast during the hottest months.

Some people would say it’s a younger generational mind-set, she said, parking the car. But, she went on, “it’s a way of being resilient. You’re highly adaptable during fire season.” In her trunk, she has an emergency kit with a hand axe, a hard hat, and a seven-day supply of contact lenses. She plans to purchase a chainsaw. “I’m always thinking worst-case scenario,” she said.

In April of 1991, Indigenous people living on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, noticed a sulfurous smell in the air. It was emerging, along with gusts of steam, from a giant crack that had opened in the mountainside. Scientists set up a monitoring system and concluded that an eruption was likely. Around a million people lived near the mountain, and most of them didn’t know it was a volcano; the government rushed out a public-awareness campaign and created evacuation maps and a five-level system of volcanic-activity alerts. On June 15th, the volcano erupted, unleashing a seventeen-mile-high mushroom-like cloud that sparked lightning. A typhoon happened to be moving through, and pounding rains mixed with fiery, superheated avalanches of gas, ash, and molten rock. The decision-making had been fraught and full of uncertainties; the death toll should have been huge. And yet, by the time of eruption, more than sixty thousand people had departed from the zones of greatest peril, many transported by government-arranged buses and trucks. The main eruptions killed around three hundred and fifty people. The evacuation is now a classic study in the field of disaster-response management.

Ideally, as in the case of Pinatubo, evacuations follow a script. Emergency responders recognize a threat, identify at-risk areas, and call for evacuations using warning systems that function well; residents are notified zone by zone and, after making mental and logistical preparations, escape. But, especially in the case of catastrophic wildfires, the script may be easier described than executed. The problem isn’t mass panic of the sort featured in Hollywood movies—research has shown that such panic at moments of disaster is a myth. Instead, systems can stumble for lack of coördination or testing. Even well-laid plans can’t anticipate how a raging fire will interact with the specifics of landscape, weather, and human behavior. In California and the West, many county emergency managers have therefore opted not to create robust wildfire-evacuation plans, arguing that they can’t address the particulars of a blaze until it’s unfolding before them; they don’t want to be locked into designating certain evacuation routes, for example, in case those get breached by flames. But Cova and other evacuation experts argue that doing as much detailed groundwork as possible in advance is worth it, because the process can reveal problems that weren’t otherwise obvious. There is a tao of evacuation planning: you must spend time developing a detailed plan while acknowledging its limitations, so that you can be better poised to improvise as circumstances demand.

To look at any single wildfire catastrophe is to grasp the huge number of factors that planners and residents must confront both beforehand and in the moment. A prime example is what happened in the town of Paradise, California, in 2018. The town’s managers had had the foresight to craft a wildfire-evacuation plan, identifying egress routes and conducting, in 2016, a community drill. But participation was low, and a few years prior the town had unwisely decided to narrow part of the primary evacuation thoroughfare from four lanes to two. No one anticipated an apocalypse that would overpower all their systems. In November of 2018, state fire officials learned of a fire ignition near the town; within ninety minutes, they’d told the county sheriff to issue evacuation orders for a limited number of areas. But the fire, driven by howling winds, spread at a speed beyond their experience, and they were slow to issue further orders.

As the journalist Lizzie Johnson has reported, in “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” a wider evacuation commenced only after an emergency dispatcher for Cal Fire, alarmed by calls from residents, jumped the chain of command to have the sheriff evacuate the entire town. By then, it was too late. Flames engulfed most of the main escape roads, and gridlock ensued as thousands of cars jammed the primary evacuation route, surrounded by flames. Eighty-five people, many elderly and trapped at home, died in what has become known as the Camp Fire—the deadliest inferno in California history.

The Camp Fire was a shocking lesson in threat evaluation. It showed fire officials that they needed to call for evacuations far sooner in extreme wildfires rather than waiting for a more complete picture of the threat. At the same time, it underscored the limits of alerting technology. Officials in Paradise had relied upon an opt-in emergency-messaging system called CodeRED, but only a small proportion of residents register for such systems. Many evacuation experts recommend using a federal Amber Alert-style system, which automatically pings every cell phone in a disaster area, but significant cell-phone infrastructure was soon overloaded or destroyed during the disaster.

Even if people get orders to evacuate, not everyone will quickly follow through. McCaffrey, the U.S. Forest Service researcher, has studied people’s wildfire-evacuation preferences. She and her colleagues have found that in communities in South Carolina, Texas, and Washington State that have experienced wildfires, only one in four people is inclined to leave immediately upon receiving an official evacuation order; two-thirds favor a wait-and-see approach—it’s common, research finds, for people to scan outside for smoke or flames, or check with neighbors or other trusted sources—and roughly one in ten figures that he will stay and fight. Some homeowners, McCaffrey noted, simply feel that they can’t afford to lose their abodes. An intention to leave promptly may founder on last-minute complexities. What if an evacuation order comes when families are scattered at work and school? Does an elderly aunt have to be picked up along the way?

First responders in the C.Z.U. Fire knew about Paradise, and were able to avert a catastrophic loss of lives. Still, on the night the conflagration blew up in Santa Cruz County, they were caught off guard, and some orders were issued too late. “That fire was growing so rapidly, we didn’t know exactly where it was,” Nate Armstrong, who at the time of the disaster was a deputy chief in Cal Fire’s C.Z.U. unit, told me. Heavy smoke made it impossible to get fire-location intel from fire-mapping aircraft. Other factors—poor cell signals, overloaded telecommunications networks, power outages, burned infrastructure—created some alert-system failures. In the off-the-grid community of Last Chance, some people received reverse-911 landline calls after dark—but by then houses were aflame, and one man perished. Other residents, such as the Firebaughs, didn’t see or receive alerts disseminated via social media, CodeRed, or the Amber Alert system in time.

Amid the communications chaos, some people decided to clear out without waiting for word from the authorities. Meanwhile, roughly two dozen sheriff’s deputies started driving around, knocking on doors to tell people to get out; the cops moved systematically from north to south along the San Lorenzo Valley so as to avoid unleashing a simultaneous emptying of the entire area. (By the next day, two hundred officers were engaged in the effort.) Residents also consulted a new online map from a San Francisco-based tech startup called Zonehaven, which allowed the public to track evacuation warnings and orders in real time, without waiting for notifications. Zonehaven’s software is targeted primarily at fire, police, and emergency-services departments, which have traditionally used paper maps to decide on evacuation zones even as fires spread (a process that can take hours); its algorithm analyzes data on geography, population, and housing density, among other factors, and looks at traffic flow, to suggest pre-planned evacuation zones. In the C.Z.U. fire, its début, the Zonehaven platform provided the emergency agencies with what’s known as a common operating picture, helping them manage the evacuation of seventy-seven thousand people over five days. Some thirty counties in California now use Zonehaven, and it was deployed last year in thirty-seven wildfires.

Other new technology tools, such as sensors for detecting fires early, promise to optimize the emergency response and evacuation process further. And yet there are limits to how much a wildfire evacuation can be standardized or perfected. Aggressive, rapidly spreading conflagrations leave little margin for hesitation or error, and uncertainty on the ground is unavoidable. Every person’s evacuation experience is different. This summer, Jo Romaniello, a therapist who set up a Facebook page during the C.Z.U. fire where people could share their experiences, co-authored “The People Not the Fire: Stories of Resilience,” a book containing thirty diverse narratives of the disaster in Boulder Creek, a town in the northern San Lorenzo Valley. Although many people received alerts and had relatively orderly evacuations, some describe learning of the emergency from helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting orders to get out. Others, in areas that burned first, barely escaped the flames: one couple, finding their driveway blocked by fire, made it out in their cars at midnight with nothing but their dogs, the clothes they wore, a purse, and a violin. Romaniello and her husband weren’t registered for CodeRED, and never received a reverse-911 call; they heard about the danger when a friend called them. Unsure when to leave, they packed and evacuated late, at 2:30 A.M., after a deputy drove through their area with a bullhorn. By then, they could hear the roar of the fire. Nearby propane tanks were exploding, and the night sky was blazing red. They drove out into a blizzard of falling ash.

Knowing that Cal Fire was short-staffed and underequipped, a small cadre of people in the Santa Cruz mountains, some with firefighting experience, decided that their best bet was to stay and fight for their homes themselves. (A few had already evacuated with their spouses, children, and animals, but then chose to go back, alone, to their homes.) They used chainsaws, tractors, bulldozers, and other equipment to remove trees and understory, clearing fuel breaks around their property. On Westdale Drive, a private road with thirty-seven houses just south of the Firebaughs’ in Bonny Doon, seven households used makeshift water trucks and fire hoses to extinguish spot fires created by falling embers. The neighborhood later credited the crew with saving it: had the ignitions escalated, flames could have overrun many homes.

Inexperienced wildfire-fighting attempts by civilians can put them in grave danger, and first responders sometimes end up diverted from firefighting as they try to persuade residents to leave. Armstrong, from Cal Fire, told me that fire crews got several property owners out at the last minute, “with the fire right on their heels.” But Stasiewicz believes that people should be provided with guidance on surviving, as a last resort, in their homes or at refuge points, such as local baseball fields or store parking lots. Some ranching communities in the intermountain West have organized their own volunteer firefighting services, in coöperation with state and federal agencies that provide training and radios.

LizAnne Jensen, a former treasurer of the Fire Safe Council of Santa Cruz County, a nonprofit group that helps homeowners with wildfire protection, lives with her husband, Ken, on Westdale Drive, in a beige stucco house next to a studio where they craft and sell copper weathervanes. They have invested more than sixty thousand dollars in home-hardening and fuel-reduction improvements, going so far as to pay for work on neighboring property. On a bright summer day, LizAnne gave me a tour of their home. Wooden gates and fences, she said, can “carry fire right up to your house”; they’d replaced the timber gates leading to their back patio with ones made of polished corrugated steel. Their woodshed had been shielded with metal screen panels to keep out embers, and their doormats were made of metal grating. Their roof, which was covered in brown fire-resistant shingles and trimmed with green-painted metal flashing, was also rigged with sprinklers; a homemade misting system hidden under the eaves was capable of soaking the surrounding ground in minutes. Multiple fire hoses snaked across the small, parched meadow that separated their house and studio from the nearby woods, ready to draw from two tanks holding more than ten thousand gallons of water, or from their fourteen-thousand-gallon swimming pool.

As part of her work with the Fire Safe Council, LizAnne had helped draw up fire-readiness checklists. Whenever it’s red-flag-warning fire weather, she and her husband start working through a four-page series of tasks: agree on a meeting place if they get separated, secure the cats, charge and wear their walkie-talkies, move patio-furniture cushions indoors, sweep the roof and gutters, fuel the generator, and so on. The C.Z.U. fire, she said, had been their third evacuation in a dozen years. She had packed for thirteen hours, then left the house in her S.U.V. at 3:30 A.M. The Jensens hadn’t received an evacuation alert, but it was smoky, and burning embers were falling around them. Ken planned to follow, but first went to pick up an out-of-town neighbor’s cat and bird; at the last minute, he decided to hunker down at home, and teamed up with the other Westdale homeowners to defend their turf.

The post The Terrifying Decisions Created by Wildfires appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the city’s 10th cultural district on Tuesday, a move that will recognize Pacific Islanders in Visitacion Valley and provide resources to support the dwindling community’s growth.

“People will be able to go somewhere they belong, somewhere people understand them, somewhere where they have all the same access to resources as every other community,” said Gaynor Siataga, the director of San Francisco’s Pacific Islander Community Hub and a leading advocate for the cultural district. “This will give them a sense of identity and belonging here in this wonderful city.”

Pacific Islanders’ roots in San Francisco date back to when it was still a settlement. But the community has steadily decreased in size — from more than 8,600 residents in 1990 to about 2,150 last year, or roughly 0.4% of the city’s population. Strong socioeconomic challenges, including high levels of poverty, unemployment and chronic health conditions, contributed to the community’s decline and intensified during the pandemic.

Around the same time that several Pacific Islander community-based organizations teamed up to respond to the population’s high rates of COVID-19 illness and death, planning for the cultural district started in earnest.

Tuesday’s 11-0 vote was seen as a culmination of those years-long efforts, but not an end point to them.

“We have folks who really want to come back to the city,” said Tino Felise, the neighborhood program coordinator at the Samoan Community Development Center and one of those behind the effort to create the cultural district. “Hopefully, establishing this cultural district will help us re-establish our population, and make sure this is a place Pacific Islanders can continue to call home.”

In coming months, the office of Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents the area where the new district will be established, will work with Pacific Islander community leaders to cement the exact geographic boundaries of the district and solidify plans to protect and support the Pacific Islander community . This begins with the creation of a three-year strategic plan, according to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, and the hiring of a cultural district staff.

Once finalized, the area will be awarded the annual funding provided to each district: $230,000 of hotel tax funds to plan for the services, resources and programs, all of which will be designed by a new cultural district advisory board and the city.

“I think the cultural district will really begin to allow everyone to see the specific needs of the Pacific Islander community, and focus on strengthening the solutions to supporting them,” Walton said.

Julia Sabory, who manages community planning and cultural districts at the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said cultural districts can elevate a community’s voice at the policymaking table while promoting programs that are created with and for the populations they serve.

“It’s not so much about the numbers and the masses of residents,” Sabory said. “It’s about addressing the systemic exclusion of groups, and trying to include them into processes and opportunities to improve that community’s quality of life.”

“Getting the cultural district approved is just the beginning,” said Siataga. “The work — the deep-rooted work — starts after.”

Elissa Miolene is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco. Twitter: @elissamio

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We drove back to her house, near the beach, in the city of Santa Cruz, and Stasiewicz mused on the contrast between our settled way of life and the habits of Indigenous tribes. Native Americans had once moved around seasonally while stewarding their forests by means of controlled burns. Today, perhaps, wildfires and their evacuations are forcing people to return to a semi-nomadic existence. Stasiewicz has friends with respiratory ailments who can’t tolerate the wildfire smoke that now routinely blankets the West Coast; their new seasonal routine is to move to the East Coast during the hottest months.

Some people would say it’s a younger generational mind-set, she said, parking the car. But, she went on, “it’s a way of being resilient. You’re highly adaptable during fire season.” In her trunk, she has an emergency kit with a hand axe, a hard hat, and a seven-day supply of contact lenses. She plans to purchase a chainsaw. “I’m always thinking worst-case scenario,” she said.

In April of 1991, Indigenous people living on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines, noticed a sulfurous smell in the air. It was emerging, along with gusts of steam, from a giant crack that had opened in the mountainside. Scientists set up a monitoring system and concluded that an eruption was likely. Around a million people lived near the mountain, and most of them didn’t know it was a volcano; the government rushed out a public-awareness campaign and created evacuation maps and a five-level system of volcanic-activity alerts. On June 15th, the volcano erupted, unleashing a seventeen-mile-high mushroom-like cloud that sparked lightning. A typhoon happened to be moving through, and pounding rains mixed with fiery, superheated avalanches of gas, ash, and molten rock. The decision-making had been fraught and full of uncertainties; the death toll should have been huge. And yet, by the time of eruption, more than sixty thousand people had departed from the zones of greatest peril, many transported by government-arranged buses and trucks. The main eruptions killed around three hundred and fifty people. The evacuation is now a classic study in the field of disaster-response management.

Ideally, as in the case of Pinatubo, evacuations follow a script. Emergency responders recognize a threat, identify at-risk areas, and call for evacuations using warning systems that function well; residents are notified zone by zone and, after making mental and logistical preparations, escape. But, especially in the case of catastrophic wildfires, the script may be easier described than executed. The problem isn’t mass panic of the sort featured in Hollywood movies—research has shown that such panic at moments of disaster is a myth. Instead, systems can stumble for lack of coördination or testing. Even well-laid plans can’t anticipate how a raging fire will interact with the specifics of landscape, weather, and human behavior. In California and the West, many county emergency managers have therefore opted not to create robust wildfire-evacuation plans, arguing that they can’t address the particulars of a blaze until it’s unfolding before them; they don’t want to be locked into designating certain evacuation routes, for example, in case those get breached by flames. But Cova and other evacuation experts argue that doing as much detailed groundwork as possible in advance is worth it, because the process can reveal problems that weren’t otherwise obvious. There is a tao of evacuation planning: you must spend time developing a detailed plan while acknowledging its limitations, so that you can be better poised to improvise as circumstances demand.

To look at any single wildfire catastrophe is to grasp the huge number of factors that planners and residents must confront both beforehand and in the moment. A prime example is what happened in the town of Paradise, California, in 2018. The town’s managers had had the foresight to craft a wildfire-evacuation plan, identifying egress routes and conducting, in 2016, a community drill. But participation was low, and a few years prior the town had unwisely decided to narrow part of the primary evacuation thoroughfare from four lanes to two. No one anticipated an apocalypse that would overpower all their systems. In November of 2018, state fire officials learned of a fire ignition near the town; within ninety minutes, they’d told the county sheriff to issue evacuation orders for a limited number of areas. But the fire, driven by howling winds, spread at a speed beyond their experience, and they were slow to issue further orders.

As the journalist Lizzie Johnson has reported, in “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” a wider evacuation commenced only after an emergency dispatcher for Cal Fire, alarmed by calls from residents, jumped the chain of command to have the sheriff evacuate the entire town. By then, it was too late. Flames engulfed most of the main escape roads, and gridlock ensued as thousands of cars jammed the primary evacuation route, surrounded by flames. Eighty-five people, many elderly and trapped at home, died in what has become known as the Camp Fire—the deadliest inferno in California history.

The Camp Fire was a shocking lesson in threat evaluation. It showed fire officials that they needed to call for evacuations far sooner in extreme wildfires rather than waiting for a more complete picture of the threat. At the same time, it underscored the limits of alerting technology. Officials in Paradise had relied upon an opt-in emergency-messaging system called CodeRED, but only a small proportion of residents register for such systems. Many evacuation experts recommend using a federal Amber Alert-style system, which automatically pings every cell phone in a disaster area, but significant cell-phone infrastructure was soon overloaded or destroyed during the disaster.

Even if people get orders to evacuate, not everyone will quickly follow through. McCaffrey, the U.S. Forest Service researcher, has studied people’s wildfire-evacuation preferences. She and her colleagues have found that in communities in South Carolina, Texas, and Washington State that have experienced wildfires, only one in four people is inclined to leave immediately upon receiving an official evacuation order; two-thirds favor a wait-and-see approach—it’s common, research finds, for people to scan outside for smoke or flames, or check with neighbors or other trusted sources—and roughly one in ten figures that he will stay and fight. Some homeowners, McCaffrey noted, simply feel that they can’t afford to lose their abodes. An intention to leave promptly may founder on last-minute complexities. What if an evacuation order comes when families are scattered at work and school? Does an elderly aunt have to be picked up along the way?

First responders in the C.Z.U. Fire knew about Paradise, and were able to avert a catastrophic loss of lives. Still, on the night the conflagration blew up in Santa Cruz County, they were caught off guard, and some orders were issued too late. “That fire was growing so rapidly, we didn’t know exactly where it was,” Nate Armstrong, who at the time of the disaster was a deputy chief in Cal Fire’s C.Z.U. unit, told me. Heavy smoke made it impossible to get fire-location intel from fire-mapping aircraft. Other factors—poor cell signals, overloaded telecommunications networks, power outages, burned infrastructure—created some alert-system failures. In the off-the-grid community of Last Chance, some people received reverse-911 landline calls after dark—but by then houses were aflame, and one man perished. Other residents, such as the Firebaughs, didn’t see or receive alerts disseminated via social media, CodeRed, or the Amber Alert system in time.

Amid the communications chaos, some people decided to clear out without waiting for word from the authorities. Meanwhile, roughly two dozen sheriff’s deputies started driving around, knocking on doors to tell people to get out; the cops moved systematically from north to south along the San Lorenzo Valley so as to avoid unleashing a simultaneous emptying of the entire area. (By the next day, two hundred officers were engaged in the effort.) Residents also consulted a new online map from a San Francisco-based tech startup called Zonehaven, which allowed the public to track evacuation warnings and orders in real time, without waiting for notifications. Zonehaven’s software is targeted primarily at fire, police, and emergency-services departments, which have traditionally used paper maps to decide on evacuation zones even as fires spread (a process that can take hours); its algorithm analyzes data on geography, population, and housing density, among other factors, and looks at traffic flow, to suggest pre-planned evacuation zones. In the C.Z.U. fire, its début, the Zonehaven platform provided the emergency agencies with what’s known as a common operating picture, helping them manage the evacuation of seventy-seven thousand people over five days. Some thirty counties in California now use Zonehaven, and it was deployed last year in thirty-seven wildfires.

Other new technology tools, such as sensors for detecting fires early, promise to optimize the emergency response and evacuation process further. And yet there are limits to how much a wildfire evacuation can be standardized or perfected. Aggressive, rapidly spreading conflagrations leave little margin for hesitation or error, and uncertainty on the ground is unavoidable. Every person’s evacuation experience is different. This summer, Jo Romaniello, a therapist who set up a Facebook page during the C.Z.U. fire where people could share their experiences, co-authored “The People Not the Fire: Stories of Resilience,” a book containing thirty diverse narratives of the disaster in Boulder Creek, a town in the northern San Lorenzo Valley. Although many people received alerts and had relatively orderly evacuations, some describe learning of the emergency from helicopters flying overhead, broadcasting orders to get out. Others, in areas that burned first, barely escaped the flames: one couple, finding their driveway blocked by fire, made it out in their cars at midnight with nothing but their dogs, the clothes they wore, a purse, and a violin. Romaniello and her husband weren’t registered for CodeRED, and never received a reverse-911 call; they heard about the danger when a friend called them. Unsure when to leave, they packed and evacuated late, at 2:30 A.M., after a deputy drove through their area with a bullhorn. By then, they could hear the roar of the fire. Nearby propane tanks were exploding, and the night sky was blazing red. They drove out into a blizzard of falling ash.

Knowing that Cal Fire was short-staffed and underequipped, a small cadre of people in the Santa Cruz mountains, some with firefighting experience, decided that their best bet was to stay and fight for their homes themselves. (A few had already evacuated with their spouses, children, and animals, but then chose to go back, alone, to their homes.) They used chainsaws, tractors, bulldozers, and other equipment to remove trees and understory, clearing fuel breaks around their property. On Westdale Drive, a private road with thirty-seven houses just south of the Firebaughs’ in Bonny Doon, seven households used makeshift water trucks and fire hoses to extinguish spot fires created by falling embers. The neighborhood later credited the crew with saving it: had the ignitions escalated, flames could have overrun many homes.

Inexperienced wildfire-fighting attempts by civilians can put them in grave danger, and first responders sometimes end up diverted from firefighting as they try to persuade residents to leave. Armstrong, from Cal Fire, told me that fire crews got several property owners out at the last minute, “with the fire right on their heels.” But Stasiewicz believes that people should be provided with guidance on surviving, as a last resort, in their homes or at refuge points, such as local baseball fields or store parking lots. Some ranching communities in the intermountain West have organized their own volunteer firefighting services, in coöperation with state and federal agencies that provide training and radios.

LizAnne Jensen, a former treasurer of the Fire Safe Council of Santa Cruz County, a nonprofit group that helps homeowners with wildfire protection, lives with her husband, Ken, on Westdale Drive, in a beige stucco house next to a studio where they craft and sell copper weathervanes. They have invested more than sixty thousand dollars in home-hardening and fuel-reduction improvements, going so far as to pay for work on neighboring property. On a bright summer day, LizAnne gave me a tour of their home. Wooden gates and fences, she said, can “carry fire right up to your house”; they’d replaced the timber gates leading to their back patio with ones made of polished corrugated steel. Their woodshed had been shielded with metal screen panels to keep out embers, and their doormats were made of metal grating. Their roof, which was covered in brown fire-resistant shingles and trimmed with green-painted metal flashing, was also rigged with sprinklers; a homemade misting system hidden under the eaves was capable of soaking the surrounding ground in minutes. Multiple fire hoses snaked across the small, parched meadow that separated their house and studio from the nearby woods, ready to draw from two tanks holding more than ten thousand gallons of water, or from their fourteen-thousand-gallon swimming pool.

As part of her work with the Fire Safe Council, LizAnne had helped draw up fire-readiness checklists. Whenever it’s red-flag-warning fire weather, she and her husband start working through a four-page series of tasks: agree on a meeting place if they get separated, secure the cats, charge and wear their walkie-talkies, move patio-furniture cushions indoors, sweep the roof and gutters, fuel the generator, and so on. The C.Z.U. fire, she said, had been their third evacuation in a dozen years. She had packed for thirteen hours, then left the house in her S.U.V. at 3:30 A.M. The Jensens hadn’t received an evacuation alert, but it was smoky, and burning embers were falling around them. Ken planned to follow, but first went to pick up an out-of-town neighbor’s cat and bird; at the last minute, he decided to hunker down at home, and teamed up with the other Westdale homeowners to defend their turf.

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MARTINEZ (CBS SF / BCN) – With the 2020 census in the books, counties like Contra Costa are seeing their political landscape evolve.

The Board of Directors of Contra Costa on Tuesday unanimously approved a reallocation plan moving Diablo, Blackhawk and the Camino Tassajara area from District 3 of Supervisor Diane Burgis to District 2 of District Candace Andersen.

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The new map expands Andersen’s reach to the east, bringing the three Tri-Valley parishes into the same borough as Danville and San Ramon – cities they are already connected to based on geography and demographics.

The new plan brings all of Quill to District 1 of Supervisor John Gioia. Pittsburg’s Tuscany Meadows is moving to District 5 from Supervisor Federal Glover, dividing Antioch on Somersville Road and Auto Center Drive, which is Railroad Avenue between Glover and Burgis.

The Morgan Territory Road area within the Mt. Diablo Unified School District is being moved to District 4. Concord would be split on the former railroad access and highways 4 and 242. District 2 would now extend through Tilden Regional Park almost to Kensington. Walnut Creek would split between Districts 4 and 2 on State Highway 24 and Interstate Highway 680. The Saranap and Castle Hill areas would be in Andersen’s District 2.

Throughout the process, some areas have been pressured to keep the cities intact, which is difficult given the demands.

“It may feel like you’re divided in some ways, but there are actually advantages,” said Burgis. “You don’t have just two overseers running a town; Supervisor Glover and I share Antioch and I don’t say, ‘Well, where is that?’ I say, ‘Oh, it’s Antioch. I will help you. And I’m sure that will happen with Supervisor Glover too. We don’t look at the lines. ”

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Tuesday was the last of five public hearings required before a final plan has to be in place by December 15. District lines are redrawn every 10 years and are based on US census figures.

The 2020 census showed that Contra Costa County has grown by 11.35% since 2010, from 1,049,025 in 2010 to 1,168,064 residents in 2020.

The largest increase in population came in District 3 of Burgis, with an additional 36,560 residents in the area comprising much of Antioch, Oakley, Brentwood, and unregistered East Counties.

The lowest growth was in District 4 owned by Supervisor Karen Mitchoff (population 10,442), an area that includes Concord, much of Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, and Clayton.

The goal is to create counties with as similar a population as possible while following all federal and state guidelines, such as:

Burgis said the district maps should be updated on the district website on the district website by early December.

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