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tv   City of Tomorrow  CNN  July 26, 2014 11:00am-11:31am PDT

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win an award. close a deal. hire an intern. and still have time to spare. check your speed. see how fast your internet can be. switch now and add voice and tv for $34.90. comcast business. built for business. how to get a cleaner future. >> with a single key stroke you get the effect of a single task force. >> california is in a serious drought. any new water supplies are important to the region. >> it's happening right now. from l.a. to dubai. the building blocks for the next decade and beyond are all around us. i'm cnn's rachel crane. over the next half-hour we'll take you around the globe to cities preparing for the future, using technology that's change how we live. and force us to ask the
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question. is the city of tomorrow already here? the high cost energy, crime, choking air pollution, around the globe, these 21st century challenges are all being met with real innovation. in england, wind energy from the atlantic is powering london homes. police in los angeles are crunching big data to solve every day crime. and in seattle, one building is redefining what it means to be green. real solutions. but the challenges only grow bigger. according to the u.n., the world's population will reach 8.3 billion by 2030. in that same time greenhouse gases are expected to increase by 25%. the world's trash nearly doubled. while half the world will live in areas threatened by lack of water. what does that mean for cities? 60% of us will live in one bifrl 2050, 70%. the demand for clean air, water,
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energy, and yes, convenience, will skyrocket. by 2017, nearly half of the world's population will be online. and almost half of all internet traffic will travel through smart devices. imagine, fewer drivers commuting to work, smarter policing, buildings with no carbon foot print and trash cans that tell us when they're fulfill life in the city of tomorrow could be pretty great if we develop the technology we have today. in los angeles the lapd is using surveillance technology with roots in the cia. they have police cruisers that scan license plates and a data center that makes sense of it all of it may sound like science fiction, but it is real. and it is helping them solve crimes faster and with less effort. since material 1990s, crime rates have steadily declined across the country. one possible explanation? smarter data driven policing. here in los angeles, the lapd is
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embracing new technologies and big data analytics like never before. changing the way we fight crime. wax commander sergeant ken showed us how big data analysis is changing the force. >> this is our license plate reader. >> we have three cameras attached to the light bar. >> license plate readers have become common place and they automatically scan every license plate they drive by. >> it goes through sacramento database to check for california vehicle systems to see if it is stolen or if there is a warrant on it for some reason. a $30,000 warrant, a parked car that we just passed right behind us. >> over the course of the day the lament can scan thousands of license plates across the city. at the lament's real-time analysis and critical response division, they are fed into a game changing data mining system called palantir. it can claim the cia as an early
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investor. >> it is a search system. it combines disparrot data sets. with a single key stroke you get the effect of a 38-person task force. >> after searching over 100 million data points, it displayed an impressive amount of information on one burglary suspect creating a graphs, linking him to cell phone numbers, arrest records, known associates and past addresses. they could even track his past locations based on previous license plate scans. >> if we are searching for him we don't to have search all of l.a. county. we know where he frequents. >> anybody who is a vehicle owner is in pallantir? >> anybody who has pass ad license plate reader will be in our data set. we cannot just go searching for you or anyone else without a reason. because we have a lot of data for people who have done nothing. >> for those people who have done nothing, the aclu of southern california believes the
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los angeles plate readers may be violating civil liberties. >> a system of license plate readers that is pervasive enough to track the movements of every car in the city, reasonable detail, would substitute for gps trackers for everybody. the public should be the ones deciding what the proper balance is between their privacy rights and their public safety. >> the lapd believes the public wants it on its side. >> you want to have the effect of 30 detectives working that burglary or auto theft. it is hugely important to make those cases solvable. >> you may not realize it but you're being watched. here's cnn's jason carroll. >> there are literally cameras all around us. >> you walk outside your door and there's this expectation of privacy even when you're out in public. that's not the reality. as you're out here taking pictures of tall buildings and
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electronic billboards you probably don't realize the pictures are being taken of you. there are 6,000 security cameras all around the city. the question is, how much is too much? >> that's a good question. >> it depends what i'm doing. >> to walk down the street knowing someone is watching me. >> let's say you were standing in front of big ben in london they a security system called the richk steel. there are security cameras practically everywhere. let's say you were walking from one he said of the city to the other. chances are you would have been captured by a security camera there some 300 times. what are they doing with all that information that they collect? >> what are they doing? they're looking for crime. >> a lot of it goes to waste. >> i don't think they know what they're doing. >> here's the question. that a lot of people are asking themselves as we go forward.
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how much of your personal privacy are you willing to sacrifice to be safe? >> later on the show, bill nye the science guy predicts the future. erin burnett visits the tallest building. first new york city wants to count every pedestrian in manhattan and it finally has the technology to do just that. your 16-year-old daughter
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americans spend roughly 37 billion hours a year waiting in lines. at the grocery store, for a hamburger, at their favorite restaurants. imagine if you didn't have to. that may soon become a reality in new york. where they're embracing new recognition technology that will count every pedestrian in the city. >> every neighborhood in the city walks. we really need to have an understanding of what that activity looks like so we can serve new yorkers better. >> over 60% of commuters in new york city travel by foot or public transit. for a city of 8.4 million, that's a lot of people to count. >> the department of transportation counts pedestrians around the city. they sent people twice a year and they just sit there with counters. it doesn't give us a view of what it is like day in, day out. >> they're trying to change that by providing a real-time picture of new york's pedestrian traffic
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using hundreds of existing video feeds around the city. >> computer vision algorithms that make it possible to detect and count people. >> using online traffic video feeds, it counts about 10 million people a day. they can even count how many people are inside a building. the city is already using the data providing pedestrian counts to small business owners in the city's online business atlas and there is promising potential for data integration with consumer apps. >> if it was yelp or google maps, you could find a restaurant that you always wanted to try but it is always packed. right now is the right time to go. >> today the company only covers about 25% of the city. to help count the rest, placemeter is offering to pay residents to stream video from their own windows using an old smart phone. >> today we count vehicles and pedestrians.
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tomorrow we will start detecting and classifying gender, then age. then we'll start detecting people with strollers and bags and things like that. >> with detection technology rapidly improving, an obvious concern is whether the systems will be able to track the details of our daily lives. >> what we do is turn video feeds into data. a video feeds are a little creepy. somebody looks at them. in our case a computer looks at them. whatever one case gets through a system, we process it, turn it into data and delete it. >> i think there's a lot more we can do if we have better understanding. when we have to schedule trash pick-up, how many police to deploy to a particular area. the better information you have on a place, the better you'll be able to manage it. >> wherever you fall on the issue of surveillance, one thing is clear. global populations are growing and so is the need for drinkable water. in water starved san diego, they're betting big on a
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billion-dollar solution. where the largest and most advanced desalination plants in the world. with california experiencing one of the worst droughts in the state's history, access to fresh water has never been more important or more difficult. here in southern california, the largest desalination plant in the western hemisphere is being constructed. it will soon take water from the ocean and create 50 million gallons of fresh water a day. >> california is in a serious drought right now. any new water supplies are important to the region. >> we have a $190 billion economy in this region that is dependent on water. the question you need to consider is what is the cost of not having enough water? >> unlike, let's say, water that comes from rainfall or water that comes from snow pack, we're utilizing what essentially is the world's largest reservoir, the pacific ocean. >> the carlsbad desalination
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plant will cost approximately $1 billion. the fresh water will be pumped 10 miles underground to a regional delivery system. providing water to an additional 300,000 san diego county residents. customers won't know whether they're drinking desalinated water or not. >> that's right. >> that's right. it will become part of the overall supply. >> through a process called reverse osmosis, the plant will convert every two gallons of sea water into one gallon of fresh water, filtering out 99.9% of the salt. the salt or brine that's removed is discharged back into the ocean. the desalination process traditionally takes a lot of energy. a plant this size would normally use as much energy in a single day as 70 homes in a year. officials at the carlsbad plant say there's theirs will use 46% less energy. the project is not without criticism. environmentalists point out that desalination requires a lot of energy and that brine discharge
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can negatively impact marine life. >> we're creating more marine wet lands in the south san diego bay to create new habitats so fish can reproduce there. >> with respect to the brine, we dilute it before it leaves the site. >> the plant is expected to be completed in 2016. >> everybody is extremely excited to see this project coming online and providing with us a new water supply. >> after the break, we see how one building collects water in the middle of the desert. bill nye explains why batteries are critical to the future of cities. and we take a look at london's massive answer to an energy crisis. if frustration and paperwork decrease... the gap begins to close.
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so let's simplify things. let's close the gap between people and care. when folks think about wthey think salmon and energy. but the energy bp produces up here creates something else as well: jobs all over america. engineering and innovation jobs. advanced safety systems & technology. shipping and manufacturing. across the united states, bp supports more than a quarter million jobs. when we set up operation in one part of the country, people in other parts go to work. that's not a coincidence. it's one more part of our commitment to america.
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later, erin burnett visits dubai and we see how a skyscraper collects water in the middle have to desert.
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first we take a look at how london is harnessing the power of the wind. this is the london array. it is the world's largest offshore wind farm. and this is what it helps power. the farm has 175 giant wind turbines capable of generating enough electricity to power half a million homes. and it is quite possibly the answer to london's growing energy needs. >> we expect about 900,000 tons that would have been put into the atmosphere. it is about the equivalent of under 300,000 cars a year being taken off the road. >> approximately 8.3 million people live here. by 2031, that number is expected to climb to 10 million. a growing population that means a growing need for energy. london, one of the most historic cities in the world knows in
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order to keep up with future energy demands, they need to update and diversify their energy portfolio. >> how do we get to a more cleaner future, a reliable energy source? that's what the london array is about. moving from that old coal, gas, nuclear, to winds. >> they are one of the leaders in offshore wind power. there are over 1,000 turbines dotting the waters. these things are massive. each turbine is larger than the london eye and it takes as little as a 10-mile-an-hour gust to spin these. until recently, the array was set to expand by possibly 57 more turbines but construction was halted to save a rare breed of bird called the red throated diver. >> a rare species of bird in the u.k. they come down in the winter and feed there. >> the fear is that the construction in the second phase would displace the birds. is that a bit of a disappointment that it is not in the near future for you?
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>> as an engineer i always want to build things. so of course i would like things to go ahead. about you have to be realistic. >> the future will present more obstacles than a bird. one thing is certain. more of these means more of this. thousands of miles from england in the desert of dubai is the tallest building ever built and it may also be one of the smartest. here's cnn's erin burnett. >> at 2716 feet it is the tallest structure ever built on earth. towering over the city, it has the highest observation deck and the highest restaurant and sky scraper and the owners say it has the highest swimming pool in the world. >> is there room for tall buildings like this that aren't just a landmark or something beautiful to look at but actually function and are efficient and profitable? >> i think there are. i think they are building smarter. and more efficient. he built it at an estimated $1.5
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billion. its doors opened in 2010. >> today it was, i don't know. 110 degrees. how do you keep this cool? >> of course it is a combination of good design to start with, good advancement, good electrical system. the skin on the building, the type of glass we are using, the way it reflects heat, all of that is a combination. technologies and monitoring the building every single hour. >> using an innovative thermal ice storage system, the tower is currently kept cool with the equivalent of 13,000 tons of ice. it is monitored 24 hours a day in a control room where they measure everything from power and wind speed and seismic activity on. a windy day top of the tower can move up to six feet in either direction. and the base is designed to shift in the event of an earthquake. do you get a little nervous? >> i used to.
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now i trust it. last week we had quite a good movement. >> get into the observation deck on the 124th floor takes only about 60 seconds in one of the 57 elevators. the lifts can move up to 12,000 people a day and even act as a power source. >> they're creating power? >> of course they create power. then the power goes back to the grid system that we have. >> he explains how it captures water from outside the building it seventh in dubai's sweltering humid air. >> we take pride in the condensation that's happening on the skin of the building. what we collect is the equivalent of 20 olympic pool sizes of condensation on the skin of the building and it is very valuable when you live in the desert. >> while it's only been open four years, he is already thinking of building bigger and better. >> height is something very special for human beings. i think we can do much better next time.
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>> after the break, bill nye describes his ideal city of tomorrow. ♪
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bill nye is obsessed with science and he spends a lot of time thinking about how climate changes affects our lives and our cities. so we asked him. what does his city of tomorrow look like? >> the future is the child of the past. >> when i think of the city of the future, i think of doing more with less.
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of having more efficient water distribution systems. >> we can drive anywhere we want at any time for any reason. >> more efficient transportation systems, citywide part of your tax dollars internet access. >> we're not buying power. we're buying knowledge. the big problem we need to solve is electricity storage. >> how to get this power. >> if we could generate electricity offshore or in big open areas and make electricity locally with solar panels and we had a way to store that, and move it around the city electronically in a smart fashion with a smart electrical grid, we would be doing more with less on a scale that would absolutely change the world. >> a big hope for the future. >> you have to be optimistic. you have to think these problems are solvable or you won't solve them. >> one small step for man -- >> to remind everybody, people went to the moon. so we can do this. and working together, we can make cities the most productive
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part of human civilization. we can change the world. >> we don't exactly know what the city of tomorrow will look like. there are a lot of people working on a lot of solutions to a lot of problems. what we do know is that the need to create the city of tomorrow is powering the pulse of the innovation today. we have some news we want to bring to you. no cease fire extension. just announced by hamas spokesman. there had been a humanitarian cease fire in gaza for those 12 hours. now that ended at 1:00 p.m. eastern. israel had agreed to extend the cease fire by four hours. again, we now know that hamas did not agree. and just moments after that 12 hours wrapped up, israel

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