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One of the most important races on the August ballot is the Democratic primary to decide who takes on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in November: Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried vs. Congressman Charlie Crist.

As the race goes down the home stretch, campaign donations have increasingly become an issue in the race. While both campaigns have hundreds of small-dollar donations, NBC 6 Investigators wanted to look at the major funders of both the candidates.

One of the most recent large donations was $100,000 from Michael Fernandez. In total, hes given Fried more than $400,000. Fernandez usually gives to Republican candidates; most notably supporting Jeb Bush or other opponents of then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary for president.

Her Bold Move Action, a group supporting women candidates who support abortion access, donated $100,000 to Fried.

Fried has received several hundred thousand dollars from political committees commonly used by large sugar companies, public utilities, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, and the big business advocacy arm the Associated Industries of Florida.

Education for All, Floridians for Economic Advancement, Floridians for a Stronger Democracy, Florida Alliance for Better Government, and other similarly titled committees are largely funded by Florida Power and Light and its parent company NextEra Energy, sugar company Florida Crystals and Associated Industries. Usually, the donations come in the form of $10,000 or $15,000 chunks. The most recent ones were in July.

The NBC 6 Investigators get results

The Crist-supporting VoteWater advocacy group earlier drew attention to the donations from the sugar companies. NBC 6 requested a comment from Frieds campaign and has not yet heard back.

Political committees are a way for individuals, corporations, unions, other interests to hide money so to speak. This is all legal under Florida law, said NBC 6 political analyst Carlos Curbelo.

Curbelo says big business groups donate to Fried for several reasons. First, companies usually donate to get the ear of their regulators and as commissioner of agriculture, Fried plays a key role in regulating big industry. Some of their donations came into Frieds political committee Florida Consumers First before she announced her run for governor.

They just know her because theyve had to interact with her over the last four years. So, a lot of times companies and individuals feel comfortable supporting someone they know, Curbelo said.

Second, many of these companies may dislike Crist more than they like Fried, and they want to make his life difficult. When he was the Republican attorney general and governor, Crist often clashed with FPL and big sugar companies.

Charlie Crist is a populist. And even when he was a Republican governor, he still had a strong populist streak, Curbelo said.

Representative Charlie Crist has raised more money in the race for governor. He got an early boost from transferring $185,000 from his campaign for U.S. Congress.

Just this month, Crist received a $500,000 donation from the American Federation of Teachers, the largest teachers union in the country. Local and state teachers unions have also supported Crists campaign financially.

Then wealthy liberal philanthropists Barbara Steifel and Francoise Haasch-Jones have also cut checks totaling several hundreds of dollars.

Curbelo says the donations show that the states Democratic establishment is backing Crist over Fried.

Charlie Crist has fully transitioned to being a solid blue democrat. Charlie Crist was a Republican. Then he became an independent. For a time, he was a fairly centrist Democrat. And now, hes got the full support of the Democratic establishment, Curbelo said.

Crist, however, does also have some political committee donations. NBC 6 Investigators found one group called Winning Florida run by Fort Lauderdale election attorney Jason Blank gave to both Crist and Fried. That organization is partially funded by Florida sugar and utility interests.

You can explore the candidates donations online at the secretary of states database for:

Nikki Fried and Frieds political committee

Charlie Crist and his political committee

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Here Are the Major Donors to Democratic Gov. Candidates Fried and Crist - NBC 6 South Florida

Democracy is the problem that capital is always striving to solve. To maintain its rates of profit, it seeks to drive down the taxes it must pay and annul the regulations that defend the living world, workers and consumers. This tends to be unpopular. Governments that permit beautiful places to be trashed, workers lives to be endangered and consumers to be conned might find themselves voted out of office. So fixes need to be found.

Political funding often does the job: research from the US shows how, generally, the party that attracts the most money wins. Distraction works pretty well, especially when it takes the form of culture wars. The billionaire press does a sterling job at misrepresenting our choices to favour the very rich. But you can never be too careful. Its safer, if possible, to bypass democracy altogether.

How? One approach is to create places where the usual rules do not apply and citizens have less decision-making power. Im talking about freeports. In crucial respects, these special economic zones operate as if they were outside a nations borders. They are the equivalent of the royal forests of medieval England. Forest derives from the Latin foris, which means outside. The forests were hunting estates where the kings private interests overrode the rights of the common people, elevating them beyond the usual laws of the land. The Westminster government has so far designated eight freeports in England, and the Scottish government is considering bids for two.

Their objectives were set by an advisory panel chaired by the two most ardent supporters of freeports in the government: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The panel was composed of two public officials, two economists, five industry lobbyists, one cities advocate, one venture capitalist and two members of dark-money thinktanks (lobby groups that refuse to reveal who funds them). No trade unions, political rights, environmental or public interest groups were represented.

The new freeports will be run by operators, among whom are some highly controversial private companies. Companies using a freeport can claim a wide range of customs privileges and tax cuts. These include business rate relief, which will deprive central government of income (because local authorities will be fully compensated by the Exchequer for the loss of rates), and employers national insurance relief, which creates a two-tier workforce: cheap and even cheaper.

The government has also offered a radical curtailment of planning rules in these zones. Its not clear, since its attempt to demolish much of the planning system collapsed in the wake of a spectacular byelection defeat, whether this promise still holds. Like most important aspects of freeports, the policy is opaque and inscrutable. But the original proposals, which have nowhere been publicly amended, offer businesses permitted development rights and local development orders, allowing them to build without the usual planning requirements.

Another offer is a simpler framework for environmental assessment. Simpler, like streamlined and flexible, is government-speak for the removal of public protections. On Teesside, environmental standards already seem to have been junked to make way for the coming freeport.

A further freeport promise is to identify opportunities for regulatory flexibility and new regulatory sandboxes. A regulatory sandbox is a place where you can test new products in a real setting, without being constrained by the usual rules. The government gives the following example: a company trialling new automated vehicles, which, in a freeport, would not require regulatory approval. This sounds to me like a formula for putting workers at risk. In none of the government documents that Ive read on freeports is there a word about democracy.

There is a further, extraordinary aspect, which is beginning to come to public attention. While the tax sites and customs sites in a freeport cover a maximum of a few hundred hectares, the operators are allowed to set an outer boundary with a diameter of up to 45km (28 miles). Where a very strong case, with a clear economic rationale, is made, the area can be even wider. There must have been some very strong cases, because some of these zones are 75km from point to point. The Plymouth and South Devon freeport incorporates the whole of Dartmoor and the entire South Hams region. The Southampton freeport includes the New Forest and the Isle of Wight. The East Midlands zone extends from Nottingham to Leicester and Burton upon Trent to Upper Broughton. In Suffolk and Essex, everywhere from Sudbury to Felixstowe and Needham Market to Clacton-on-Sea is included. The Humber freeport boundary extends from Spurn Head to Howden; Teessides from Peterlee to Staithes and Redcar to Dinsdale; East Londons from Barking to London Gateway, and Liverpools from Birkenhead to Urmston.

What these boundaries mean is, as always, clear as mud. When I asked the government to show me the very strong cases, its spokesperson told me we dont publish that information, then refused to elaborate. Perhaps its because the government has told private operators that the information contained in their bids is commercially sensitive. This is another way in which theyre protected from democracy: they are not subject to the transparency and accountability required of public bodies.

The Department for Levelling Up tells me: It is categorically not the case that the entire area has been earmarked for development or has special planning status. But if there is one thing weve learned in recent years, its to attend to what the written policy says, not to what the government says it says. I think I have now read every public official document on freeports in the United Kingdom, and I have found no such assurance. On the contrary, one of them states: Outside of customs and tax sites, wider Freeport levers, including planning freedoms ... should be targeted within the Freeport Outer Boundary.

Understandably, all this opacity is beginning to cause alarm. Some people have proposed an even more sinister agenda: the government wants to turn these places into charter cities, corporate fiefs in which environmental and workplace protections are almost entirely stripped away. There is, as yet, no evidence of this. But if any senior politician is biddable and extreme enough to extend the stupidities of freeports, it is Liz Truss. Last month she started promoting the idea of low-tax, low-regulation investment zones. As usual, she seemed to have little idea what she meant by this: the line was probably fed to her by some unaccountable thinktank. Is it a repackaging of freeports, or something else?

In any case, it will deliver nothing but harm. Freeports attract organised crime, money-laundering, drug-trafficking and terrorist finance, while bringing minimal benefits to the nations that host them. But this was never about improving our lives. On the contrary, its about subordinating our needs to those of favoured capital.

This article was amended on 18 August 2022. An earlier version stated that freeports business rates relief deprives local authorities of income; however, the government says it will fully reimburse local authorities, so the cost will be to the Exchequer, not to local authorities.

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Welcome to the freeport, where turbocapitalism tramples over British democracy - The Guardian

Making sense of AI decisions is important to researchers, decision-makers, and the wider public. Fortunately, there are methods available to ensure we know more.

Deep-learning models, of the type that are used by leading-edge AI corporations and academics, have become so complex that even the researchers that built the models struggle to understand decisions being made.

This was shown most clearly to a wide audience during DeepMinds AlphaGo tournament, in which data scientists and pro-Go players were regularly bamboozled by the AIs decision-making during the game, as it made unorthodox plays which were not considered the strongest move.

SEE ALSO: Artificial Intelligence More Accepted Post-Covid According to Study

In an attempt to better understand the models they build, AI researchers have developed three main explanation methods. These are local explanation methods, which explain one specific decision, rather than the decision making for an entire model, which can be challenging given the scale.

Yilun Zhou, a graduate student in the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), discussed these methods in a MIT News article.

Feature attribution

With feature attribution, an AI model will identify which parts of an input were important to a specific decision. In the case of an x-ray, researchers can see a heatmap or the individual pixels that the model perceived as most important to making its decision.

Using this feature attribution explanation, you can check to see whether a spurious correlation is a concern. For instance, it will show if the pixels in a watermark are highlighted or if the pixels in an actual tumor are highlighted, said Zhou.

Counterfactual explanation

When coming to a decision, the human on the other side may be confused as to why an AI has decided one way or the other. As AI is being deployed in high-stakes environments, such as in prisons, insurance, or mortgages, knowing why an AI rejected an offer or appeal should help them attain approval the next time they apply.

The good thing about the [counterfactual] explanation method is it tells you exactly how you need to change the input to flip the decision, which could have practical usage. For someone who is applying for a mortgage and didnt get it, this explanation would tell them what they need to do to achieve their desired outcome, said Zhou.

Sample importance

Sample importance explanation requires access to the underlying data behind the model. If a researcher notices what they perceive to be an error, they can run a sample importance explanation to see if the AI was fed data that it couldnt compute, which led to an error in judgment.

Read more here:
Three Methods Researchers Use To Understand AI Decisions - RTInsights

We all are aware of how important SEO has become in digital marketing to lure organic traffic onto a website and grow business. Search engine optimization (SEO) is easier said than done. To use SEO Tools for enhancing customer engagement on your business website, you need to have complete knowledge of SEO and its latest trends. You can do SEO yourself, but that requires you the training and knowledge of using all the latest tools and techniques of SEO. This is a time-consuming process and you might have to go over budget for that as you need to hire people and get tools to do SEO. Even after all this if you arent experienced your chances of success are low. All of this could be avoided if you plan to outsource your SEO.

Outsourcing SEO, means you hire an SEO Agency to perform SEO for your business. This includes designing your website, developing, and executing SEO strategies and digital PR to enhance your online presence. Outsourcing SEO gets you time to focus on your business and is an economical process.

Pros of outsourcing SEO overdoing SEO manually:

More here:
Why Outsourcing SEO is Better - The Ritz Herald

Roadside Rescue provides high-quality, damage-free towing in Bountiful and Ogden, Utah and the surrounding areas. The company has teamed up with Utah-based digital marketing company SEO National to make it easier for people with either emergency or scheduled towing needs to find Roadside Rescue online.

We offer a comprehensive range of towing services, and were excited to work with SEO National to get the word out on what we can provide for our Wasatch Front communities, said James Fullmer, Roadside Rescue President. These services include 5th wheel towing, lockout and jumpstart capabilities, wrecker and flat-bed towing, and advanced towing equipment to protect vehicles from damage.

Roadside Rescue requires its drivers to pass a background check, have a clean driving record, and be Wreckmaster certified, the gold standard in towing credentials. The training doesnt stop when drivers are first hired, it continues for the full time they are employed, said Fullmer. In our industry vehicles are always changing, and we need to stay up to date on all makes and models.

Since breakdowns and accidents happen at all hours of the day, Roadside Rescue offers affordable towing 24/7 and quick response times. We understand that when youre stuck on the side of the road, especially late at night or in bad weather, the last thing you want to do is wait hours for a tow truck to arrive, said Fullmer. Thats where you can count on our trained professionals to respond as quickly as possible.

Damon Burton, SEO National President, said that Roadside Rescue offers a unique service in Utah, and he is excited to help market it to a wider audience. There are a lot of towing companies out there, but Roadside tows things that other companies wont touch. Whether it be a 5th wheel or a truck with a busted ball joint or axle, a classic car or a lowered vehicle, Roadside Rescue offers a reasonably-priced towing experience every time, day or night.

SEO National is a Google 5-Star-rated search engine optimization company and works with dozens of companies nationwide, including mom-and-pop operations, startups, and large Inc. 5000 corporations.

For more information on Roadside Rescue towing services, visit their website at http://www.RoadsideRescueInc.com or call (801) 803-4900.

About Roadside Rescue

Roadside Rescue is a tow truck company that provides 24/7 reliable towing services and roadside assistance needs. Roadside. As a 5-star towing company, Roadside Rescue is meticulously dedicated to customer satisfaction.

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Roadside Rescue Towing Company Hitches Up with SEO National to Boost Online Presence - PRUnderground