CA legislature takes up housing bills this week, the California Future Health Workforce commission is unveiled, study examines how to build trust in autonomous cars.
Ousted Google employee teams up with Republican party official
Former Google employee James Damore has lawyered up. Damore was fired by the company earlier this month after he wrote a memo criticizing Google's diversity policies. Now he's represented by a high-level Republican party official: San Francisco lawyer Harmeet Dhillon.
Dhillon's firm says it's investigating Google's employment practices. For more, Take Two spoke with Marisa Lagos, California politics and government reporter for KQED.
Press the blue play button above to hear the full interview.
New commission plans to address state healthcare worker shortage
There's a shortage of healthcare workers in California and it's projected to get even worse.
That's because the state's population will boom just as doctors and their staffs are retiring.
By 2025, California will be short 4,700 primary care doctors according to a UC-San Francisco report. But there's a suggested prescription for this problem. On Wednesday, a coalition of schools, hospitals and other groups unveiled the California Future Health Workforce Commission.
Anna Gorman is a reporter at Kaiser Health News who has been writing about it. She joined Take Two's Libby Denkmann to detail the new group's plans to address the growing problem.
To listen to the full segment, click the blue play button above.
Three proposed bills aim to address California housing crisis
California's legislature is considering several housing bills this week. Senate Bills 2, 3 and 35 all seek to increase affordable housing in California.
Take Two spoke with Capitol Public Radio reporter Ben Adler to explain the bills.
Senate Bill 2:
"That is a proposal to put a new $75 fee on real estate transaction documents, but not including home sales. There could be up to three per transaction, and of course there are many documents in each transaction so it would be up to $225. This is talking about just another fee in the closing costs, so proponents feel like it is not going to be felt quite as much, and it also doesn’t affect home buyers, so they feel that is perhaps the best of the options to raise money to help subsidize affordable housing projects."
Senate Bill 3:
"This is a housing bond. At this point, we don’t know exactly how large it will be. Current language has it at $3 billion… but, there is a proposal from Treasurer Chiang and some housing groups who did some polling and said voters would support a $6 billion bond or even a $9 billion housing bond."
Senate Bill 35:
"This would force cities and counties that fail to meet state-mandated housing production goals to approve multi-family urban development projects that meet certain requirements, like paying construction workers a prevailing wage, and also complying with zoning regulations in that area… Essentially, it seeks to streamline the development process for multi-family units in cities and counties that are falling short of state-mandated housing goals."
To listen to the full segment, click the blue play button above.
The Binge: 'Blue Ruin,' 'Green Room' and 'I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore'
Every month, we get a list of great movies and shows that are available for streaming. Writer Mark Jordan Legan is our guide.
This week we did something a little different. Let's call it Six Degrees of Jeremy Saulnier.
Saulnier is a filmmaker who's been making movies since 2007 with his high school friend Macon Blair, an incredibly talented actor and budding filmmaker in his own right. So we're looking at two films by Saulnier that star Blair, 2013's 'Blue Ruin'and 2016's'Green Room,' and a new film that was written and directed by Blair himself, 'I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore.'
BLUE RUIN (Amazon Prime)
In our first film, 'Blue Ruin,' Blair plays a beach vagrant whose life is forever changed when he learns that a person responsible for a family tragedy is getting out of prison.
One of the inspiring things about this film was that Saulnier used Kickstarter to raise money to fund the film, and it did some business in limited release but it received high critical praise – it currently has a 96% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
GREEN ROOM (Amazon Prime)
And on the strength of that, Saulnier was able to make his next project, 'Green Room,' which came out in 2016. It also got incredibly strong reviews.
It's a dark and violent film that focuses on a struggling punk rock band trying to get through a hellish tour of dive bars and ratty clubs. But on a last minute gig, they see something that they're not supposed to - and the film becomes this taut, suspenseful cat and mouse game as the band tries and figures out how to escape.
Green Room jumps from dark humor to sheer terror in the blink of an eye. It is highly recommended, but be advised it is violent and a bit gory.
Our last film is Blair's first feature film for Netflix, this year's 'I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore.'
Melanie Lynskey is splendid in the lead role of Ruth, a young woman who is having a bad go of things and what finally pushes her over the edge is when she comes home after a particularly bad day to discover her place has been burglarized.
It's full of clever insights and wry observations about today’s society and just like the other two films, there is a Coen Brothers/Quentin Tarantino feeling pulsating through all three of these movies.
Mark Jordan Legan is a writer living in Los Angeles. If you want to catch up on past segments, click here.
To build trust in self-driving cars, communication is key, Intel says
For all the attention autonomous cars are getting, you’d think more people actually want them. But they don’t. According to the American Automobile Assn., three out of four people say they’re afraid to be a passenger in a car without a driver. Trust is a major barrier.
To figure out what it would take to build that trust, computer chip maker Intel conducted a Car and Rider Trust study, the results of which were revealed Thursday.
Ten people participated in the study, held on Intel's Arizona campus. Representing a diversity of ages, ethnicities, gender and backgrounds, the participants were given a cell phone loaded with an app that allowed them to summon a ride in a self-driving car. Once the car arrived, each of the passengers got a ten-minute ride on a closed course during which they were asked to verbalize everything they were thinking as the car did things like deviate from its planned route and react to a pedestrian stepping in front of the car. They were also interviewed about the experience afterward.
The key findings ...
Humans trust other humans more than machines.
People worry that robots can’t make moral decisions -- that machines are only capable of calculating simple costs and benefits. But driving is a complicated task. It requires complex decision making to deal with things like road construction or someone unexpectedly walking into the street. So even though thousands of people lose their lives in traffic crashes each year as a result of human error, most people think they’re good drivers and they have a lot of confidence in human judgment. Self-driving cars will be safer, but machines are held to a higher standard.
A steering wheel that moves on its own provokes anxiety.
For this study, the passenger rode in the back seat. There was a person in the driver’s seat as a safety precaution, but the so-called safety driver didn’t touch the controls. The car itself was doing the driving. Seeing a steering wheel spinning around with no one touching it freaked people out, the study found. As long as the controls are there, the human instinct is to use it, so this study seems to indicate that the standard operator controls shouldn’t be there because they make passengers anxious.
Passengers want proof the technology works.
The Intel study found that passengers felt more confident about getting in the self-driving car after they were briefed on how the sensors work. And once they were in the car, they appreciated the car itself talking to them to communicate what it was doing — like re-routing. Intel says the car’s voice had a huge impact on making passengers feel comfortable. But the car also needed to know when to stop telling passengers what it was doing because it got annoying. The study also found that some passengers wanted to be able to converse with the car like they would ordinarily do with a human Uber or taxi driver. Intel says this conversational aspect will be a very important part of autonomous vehicles going forward.
Passengers feel more safe in a car that always follows the rules.
Like other self-driving cars, Intel's followed all road rules to a T, stopping at stop signs and traveling the speed limit. It didn’t drive like a human, which in theory, sounds like it would be annoying since that’s what we’re used to. But the passengers in the Intel study said that knowing the car would follow the rules at all times helped them feel safe.
Building trust with a machine is similar to building trust between humans.
Building trust requires open communication, having questions answered and being informed about what's happening.