To clean my palate after reading Comey’s A Higher Loyalty, I settled onto the couch on Sunday after my run and gobbled up John Scalzi’s Head On: A Novel of the Near Future. It was delicious and I gave it to my partner Ryan McIntyre at dinner last night (he and Katherine are in a nice rhythm of taking care of me Sunday night when Amy is away.)

If you don’t know Scalzi, he’s one of my favorite near-term sci-fi writers and joins a list that includes Hertling, Peper, Gibson, Suarez, Howey, Cline, and Weir. If those names aren’t familiar, and you like sci-fi (or want to get into it) that should keep you busy for a while. If you know those names and have others to add, leave them in the comments for me to enjoy!

Head On is the sequel to Lock In. But it’s a magical sequel (I think the official name for this is a “standalone sequel”, but I find them magical so there) – one that doesn’t require you to read the first book. If you want to quickly get into Scalzi, just read Head On, then go back and read Lock In. This morning, I discovered there is an adjacent book in the series called Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome which I just grabbed.

Here are a few tidbits for you.

Haden’s Syndrome results from a virus where 1% of people exposed become Locked-in and end up in a pseudocoma. The solution, in the near future, is surgery that results in a neural network implant, that connects the person’s brain to the Agora (a virtual world for Haden Syndrome sufferers) as well as a normal-ish existence in personal robotic transports (called Threeps).

Hilketa is a futuristic football-like game, but with swords and hammers. The two teams are made up of threeps and the only players – so far – are Hadens. The goal is to decapitate the “goat” (one of the opposing team’s players, randomly chosen throughout the game) and get it through the goalposts. No one has ever died yet during the game, until about page two of the book.

Just go read it. It’s awesome.

I’ve started training for my next marathon (number 26), which means its time to go running. Hopefully, this one will be a little better than the 5:59:59 last one in South Dakota.

Also published on Medium.

British television star Martin Lewis is suing Facebook for defamation after discovering more than 50 "scam" adverts bearing his name.

Lewis is perhaps Britain's best-known consumer rights expert, dispensing guidance through popular ITV television show "The Martin Lewis Money Show" and his website MoneySavingExpert.com.

But he said scammers are using his reputation to ensnare people into bitcoin and Cloud Trader "get-rich-quick schemes" through fake adverts on Facebook. The ads are fronts for binary trading firms, which he said are a "financially dangerous, near-certain money-loser."

A sample of two Facebook ads described by Martin Lewis. Martin Lewis

The adverts pose as news stories on websites including the BBC and The Metro, but link off to the scam websites.

Lewis has repeatedly reported the fake adverts, but said they can take "days or weeks" to be pulled down by Facebook. Once removed, he said "scammers just launch a new, nearly identical campaign very soon afterwards."

"I don't do adverts. I've told Facebook that. Any ad with my picture or name in is without my permission. I've asked it not to publish them, or at least to check their legitimacy with me before publishing. This shouldn't be difficult," Lewis said in a blog on his website.

"It's time Facebook was made to take responsibility. It claims to be a platform not a publisher — yet this isn't just a post on a web forum, it is being paid to publish, promulgate, and promote what are often fraudulent enterprises."

Lewis has issued High Court proceedings against Facebook and is working with Seddons media lawyer Mark Lewis on the case. Mark Lewis was at the forefront of efforts to expose the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Martin Lewis, who has a net worth of £125 million ($175 million) according to The Sunday Times, said the legal battle is not being done for personal gain. Any damages will be will be donated to anti-scam charities, he said.

Facebook said: "We do not allow adverts which are misleading or false on Facebook and have explained to Martin Lewis that he should report any adverts that infringe his rights and they will be removed.

"We are in direct contact with his team, offering to help and promptly investigating their requests, and only last week confirmed that several adverts and accounts that violated our advertising policies had been taken down."

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. Reuters Pictures

Good morning! Here is the tech news you need to know this Monday.

1. Aleksandr Kogan, whose quiz obtained millions of users' Facebook profiles for Cambridge Analytica, is considering suing Facebook for defamation. He admitted to violating Facebook's developer policies.

2. Google is under fire for trying to avoid the "spirit" of the law as it prepares for the EU's strict privacy regulation, GDPR. Google said it will act as a data controller under the new regulation, giving it more latitude with people's data.

3. UK health minister Jeremy Hunt wants to introduce new laws that protect children using social media. Hunt wants to do more to cut cyber-bullying and addiction, and promote healthy use of social media.

4. Florida detectives investigating a fatal police shooting went a funeral home to use the dead man's finger to unlock his phone. It didn't work.

5. WikiLeaks says cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has frozen its bitcoin account. Coinbase hasn't confirmed the suspension, and WikiLeaks is calling for a boycott of the exchange.

6. A secretive Israeli service called Terrogence used Facebook data to build a massive facial recognition database, according to Forbes. Both Terrogence and its owner Verint are contractors for the US government.

7. Iran's central bank has banned the country's banks from cryptocurrency trades. The ban is due to money laundering concerns as the country tries to halt a currency crisis.

8. Amazon expects groceries and household products to account for half its business in India next five years. The company hinted that it would bring AmazonFresh to the country.

9. Bill Gates and SoftBank have backed EarthNow, a satellite startup which provides livestreaming from almost anywhere on earth to smartphones and tablets. The footage could be used to track illegal fishing, animal migration patterns, or forest fires, EarthNow said.

10. A poll by the Independent has found that most British people think Facebook should be fined for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Just 10% thought the firm shouldn't be fined.

Congestion in Beijing can be unbearable.

With far more than 5 million registered cars, traffic can crawl at half the speed it does in New York City. And aside from toxic air pollution, the noise pollution from constant horn honking has made Beijing the sixth noisiest city in the world.

But the government, which at one point created a noise map of the city, wants that to change.

After a pilot project last year, Beijing's Traffic Management Bureau has installed 20 acoustic cameras across the city that can identify honking cars, according to Inkstone News.

The cameras, installed near schools and hospitals, use 32 microphones and a HD camera to film a two second video and capture the number plate of each honking car. The footage will then be analyzed by police to determine if car's honking was warranted and, if not, whether a $16 fine will be issued.

But noise pollution isn't limited to Beijing's streets.

Roughly 40 cities, including Shenzen, have installed acoustic cameras that can catch honking drivers with an accuracy rate of 92-95%.

Part of the problem is the chaotic nature of driving in China where there are just too many vehicles on roads that just weren't designed for vehicles. There's also some interesting engineering, such as one road that requires drivers to merge from 50 lanes into 20.

According to the World Health Organisation, China had more than 260,000 road traffic deaths in 2013, making it one of the world's most dangerous countries for drivers.

While the current technology doesn't immediately identify drivers, it likely won't be long before the acoustic cameras include facial recognition technology that links to social credit scores, deducting points for repeated honking just as China plans to do for repeat jaywalkers.

Leanne Walters didn't know why her eyelashes were falling out and her hair was thinning.

It was 2014, and her entire family was getting sicker by the day, by the gulp, every time one of them turned on the tap to take a sip of water.

Walters' three-year-old twins were breaking out in rashes, and her elder daughter's hair was dropping out in clumps. Doctors couldn't figure out why her teenage son was suffering from blurry vision and an enlarged kidney. It didn't make any sense. Flint resident Gladyes Williamson holds a bottle full of contaminated water, and a clump of her hair, after attending a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Flint, Michigan water crisis. Getty Images/Mark Wilson

But when the tap water started flowing brown in Walter's Flint, Michigan home, she understood something was amiss.

"Later on we found out about the lead," Walters said. "All those things coincide with lead exposure."

Walters is a 2018 winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize. She's one of six people around the world chosen for their grassroots environmental activism, and awarded a cash prize of about $175,000 .

The award is all for what she did next.

Walters took action, learning everything she could about what lead poisoning does to your body. After conducting her own testing, she found that the lead levels in her home — which is fitted exclusively with plastic piping — were so high that what the Walters' were drinking up every day qualified as hazardous waste.

Once Walters started speaking with neighbors, she knew she wasn't alone. The city wasn't telling the whole story about the water supply.

"We were told they were winter-izing the system, and that's what caused it," Walters said. "We were like yeah, no, something's not right here, this has never happened in three years."

That's when she enlisted the help of Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards to start city-wide tap testing for lead.

"Here's a professor, he's willing to get us test kits," Walters remembered thinking. "If we're willing to bust our asses and get this done, and prove that this is city-wide."

Together, Walters, her neighbors, and the Virginia Tech team collected more then 800 independent water samples from homes around town in Flint. The simple water bottle kits that people put under their taps to test how high the lead levels were helped prove that the city water supply was tainted with dangerously-high levels of lead.

Walters isn't done testing yet. "I want people to be aware this isn't just a Flint problem," she said.

She's worried about levels of toxic lead around the country, and has been getting letters and Facebook messages from concerned water-drinkers in states including New Jersey, Texas and California.

Walters is now gearing up to do independent, tamper-proof, and citizen-driven testing on taps around the US. She believes there are too many loopholes allowed in how many cities test their water to make sure it's safe to drink. She wants to change the way the US Environmental Protection Agency writes its lead and copper rule, so that cities can't skirt testing by toying with the water that's coming out of the tap.

LeeAnne Walters, who helped expose Flints's toxic water crisis, reads a statement during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Flint, Michigan water crisis. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

"There's no reason for children to ever be poisoned by their water," she says.

Her twins, now seven years old, are still dealing with the effects of drinking bad water. They attend speech and occupational therapy for hand-eye coordination issues and speech impairments. Walters says her own eyelashes did eventually grow back, but they're shorter than they've ever been, and the hair on the crown of her head is still "super thin."

Sometimes her kids will get frustrated trying to do things and tell her, "Mommy, I can't do it, I have lead poisoning."

"I'm like, no!" Walters said. "It's more of a challenge for you, but you're going to do it."

Last year, when McDonald's was looking for a fun way to support a promotion for $1 cold beverages, it decided to test augmented-reality ads on Snapchat designed to drive people to its restaurants.

The campaign resulted in a surge in revenue that was more than 10 times what it spent on the AR ads, according to a Nielsen poll. And people who saw the lens on Snapchat were 6% more likely to end up in a McDonald's restaurant, based on an attribution study by the mobile-data company Placed.

McDonald's is hardly alone. Hundreds of big name brands have dabbled in augmented reality, and seen promising results, over the past few years.

Yet most of them continue to regard AR only as an experiment and not as an intrinsic part of their marketing mix, according to a recent report by the consulting firm Boston Consulting Group.

Snapchat is on a mission to change that.

Snapchat sees an opening to lead the way on augmented-reality advertising

Earlier this week, the self-labeled camera company Snap introduced its latest AR-powered ad product. And it also used that opportunity to tutor a group of advertisers on the possibles of the nascent medium, via which real-world images can be blended with computer-generated visuals.

On Wednesday morning this week, Snapchat unveiled its latest AR ad product, "Shoppable AR," which is a direct-response button on top of its immersive lenses that users can tap to install an app, watch a video, or even shop for products. That same evening, its executives took the stage at the New York City headquarters of Boston Consulting Group, courting a group of advertisers including Budweiser, Coty, American Eagle, and Mondelez — a marked difference in the company's approach that for years was viewed as being unforthcoming.

As attendees mingled over cocktails and hors d'oeuvres and played with digital carousels displaying some of Snapchat's most popular lenses on the 44th floor of the Manhattan high-rise that houses Boston Consulting Group, Snap executives were out in full force, trying to convince advertisers that the camera — and specifically AR — would be the next big advertising medium.

"Earlier, people used the camera to preserve memories, but now they are using it to communicate," Snap's chief strategy officer, Imran Khan, said in his opening remarks to a room full of about 150 attendees from both brands and ad agencies. "And as they use the camera to communicate, we have found that they need more tools to create more context."

Snapchat believes that augmented reality is one such tool, which is why it has been making considerable investments in the field since it launched its first interactive lens back in 2015. The company sees vast potential in AR, and it also believes it is ahead of the curve compared with some of its rivals.

"All of these companies have been talking about prioritizing the camera and AR only very recently — we've been talking about the camera being a core part of who we are since the very beginning," said Carolina Arguelles, the AR product strategy lead at Snapchat, while delivering a presentation. "We open to the camera, and that in itself is one of our biggest differentiators as a platform."

Snapchat's aim at the event was to share research on AR, educate brands and agencies about the medium's possibilities, and, of course, try to get more marketers to try Snap's new AR ad products.

Snapchat has lots of new AR ad types, which it says can work for lots of brands

The Shoppable AR launch this week, for instance, comes on the heels of Context Cards, a tool to provide users more information about the lenses and filters they play with, and Lens Studio, which allows anybody to create an AR experience with a set of desktop creative tools.

"We're not just trying to sell to people — we're really trying to educate them because we think it's opportunistic for them," Arguelles later told Business Insider.

The filter McDonald's ran. McDonalds

The company also attempted to prove to marketers that AR ads could work both to tell stories and to promote engagement (like TV ads), as well as drive people to take actions (like buying something). Arguelles, for instance, detailed how brands like Nissan and McDonald's had used AR ads to driving foot traffic to their stores. Plus, with shoppable AR lenses, brands look to entice people to make a purchase from a product page.

Besides showcasing branded case studies, Snapchat also tried to show marketers that AR campaigns didn't necessarily have to be expensive and hugely customized — like say Taco Bell's elaborate face-taco animation from a few years ago that cost $500,000 to $750,000 by most estimates.

Instead, Snap executives said its "Swipe Up to Try" AR ad product could start at as little as $100 a day, though audience-targeted lenses and national lenses tend to cost more. Further, if brands spend enough with Snapchat, they can get Snapchat's internal team to both create and distribute AR lenses at no additional cost, according to Arguelles.

But marketers are still figuring AR out

Many of the advertisers at Snap's event said they were bullish on augmented reality. It's smart for Snap to tout its advantage in the sector as a "camera company," said Tom Buontempo, the president of the ad agency Attention, who was also at the event.

"They seem to be headed in the right direction by doubling down on something they can own," he said. "It'll be important for them to continue to evangelize the value for advertisers, while lowering the barriers to adoption associated with development and ROI so they can achieve scale."

On the other hand, while AR may be advertising's shiny new object, it's not for everybody, an executive from a big consumer-packaged-goods brand said.

"It's a low-hanging fruit for certain categories like auto and beauty," this executive said. "It's different when you're selling cereal and can't get consumers to try it on or look at a 3D product demo. You don't want to be annoying."

For its part, Snapchat is trying to tackle another new-media challenge head-on: measurement. To help, it's working with partners like Nielsen and Placed, which it recently acquired.

"One of our priorities is how advertisers can better harness the scale of AR on our platform," Arguelles said. "We also want to give them the right tools to understand the size of their audience and how they're driving business."

Two officers of the Largo Police Department in Florida arrived at a funeral home recently and asked to see the body of a man shot dead last month. They then proceeded with the gruesome duty of trying to unlock the man's mobile phone with his lifeless finger, according to a published report.

The policemen failed to open the phone belonging to 30-year old Linus Phillip, according to a report Friday in The Tampa Bay Times.

The newspaper reported that police wanted to search the handset as part of the inquiry into Phillip's death, as well as a separate drug-related investigation. A Largo police officer shot Phillip after he tried to evade arrest and nearly hit the policeman with his car, according to reports. A representative from Largo PD, located about 25 miles west of Tampa, did not respond to Business Insider's interview request.

A lot of legal and ethical questions are raised here, including whether or not police should treat the dead this way. Phillip's fiancee Victoria Armstrong said she felt violated and disrespected by the officers' actions, the Associated Press reported.

Another question, that at least those who follow technology might ask, is: what made police think that the finger of a corpse would open the phone? This wasn't the first attempt of its kind in the United States.

In November 2016, police in Ohio pressed the bloodied finger of Abdul Razak Ali Artan to his iPhone after he injured more than a dozen people at Ohio State University by stabbing and ramming his car into them, according to a report last month in Forbes. In that case too, the dead man's finger failed to open the phone.

Though it's not clear what brand of phone Phillip owned, Engadget years ago concluded that a finger from a corpse would not unlock an iPhone.

The Touch ID system uses two methods to sense and identify a fingerprint, capacitive and radio frequency. "A capacitive sensor is activated by the slight electrical charge running through your skin," wrote Engadget in 2013. "We all have a small amount of electrical current running through our bodies, and capacitive technology utilizes that to sense touch."

And the radio frequency waves in an iPhone sensor would also not open unless living tissue was present.

But according to the same story in Forbes, a workaround may be possible. The magazine quoted unnamed law-enforcement sources who indicated that police in Ohio and New York have found a way to hack a phone using a dead person's fingerprints. Unclear is whether the police already had the fingerprints on file or whether they obtained them from the bodies.

Forbes' sources said "it was now relatively common for fingerprints of the deceased to be depressed on the scanner of Apple iPhones."

And police in Largo might have also contacted companies, such as Cellebrite or GrayShift. They reportedly have the ability to hack into phones without handling corpses.

Regardless of whether police have the legal right to use a dead person's body to open a phone, they might be better served to exhaust some of the other technological options first.

Tesla has a history of beating the odds.

CEO Elon Musk has said he believed the company had around a 10% chance of success when it was founded in 2003. Since then, the company has won awards for its vehicles, built an enthusiastic fanbase, and watched its market capitalization approach and temporarily top those of General Motors, Ford, and Fiat-Chrysler.

Part of the company's success can be attributed to Musk's rare gift for storytelling. Since taking over as the company's chief executive in 2008, he's outlined a vision for the company that extends beyond selling cars to transforming global energy grids. Investors have bought that story, which is why the company has been able to raise money without much difficulty despite posting consistent deficits.

But that story has taken a hit in recent months as the company has faced concerns over its finances, ability to build cars at scale, and public comments attributed to Musk and Tesla. Now, the company is at an inflection point. Elon Musk says the company will be profitable by the end of the third quarter and won't have to raise money for the rest of the year. Some analysts and investors disagree with him.

Whether Musk lives up to his assertion could determine whether 2018 sets the stage for another improbable triumph or raise serious questions about the company's future.

Here are the moments that have led to Tesla's latest moment of reckoning.

Breanne Madigan grew up at Goldman Sachs. It was her first job out of college, and she stayed there for 13 years, first as an associate in money markets, moving up to chief operating officer of global foreign exchange, and finishing out her tenure as the head of institutional wealth services for the Americas.

It was a long career at one of the top financial firms in the country, and one which led her to one fundamental belief: Technology is changing the world of finance.

At the heart of that change, Madigan believes, are cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology behind it. So after more than a decade, she changed course and decided to join a blockchain startup — Blockchain, the startup, to be more precise.

Starting next week, Madigan will join Blockchain as its head of institutional sales and strategy. Her goal: To help scale the company's business and convince some of the biggest investors in the world that blockchain technology is the future of financial services.

Madigan sat down with Business Insider to discuss what she learned in her time at Goldman Sachs, the future of finance, and why she left a long career in banking for the wild world of cryptocurrency.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Becky Peterson: Tell me about your new job.

Breanne Madigan: I'm thrilled to be joining Blockchain. I'm going to be joining as the head of institutional sales and strategy. At a high level, it's really building and helping more traditional investors gain unparalleled access to the future of finance. I can't give too much in the way of details now about all of the exciting things that we have coming, but I can do my best to give you a flavor of what's in store for now.

I'm officially starting a week from now, but I have had the chance to spend time with the leadership team and Liana [Douillet Guzman, COO] in particular on strategy, and I'm looking forward to getting started officially on Monday.

Peterson: How is your new role different from what you were doing at Goldman Sachs?

Madigan: I'd say overall, in terms of my career at Goldman, I'm really grateful for the wonderful experiences that I had there where I was fortunate to help build and manage a number of new businesses, in some cases from scratch.

Some of the key attributes that I'll leverage in my new role here include, first and foremost, a healthy obsession with the quality of the customer experience. We learned at Goldman that always putting the client first is the right way to build any business with long-term excellence in mind.

I guess another thing that I see in common is a culture of very high expectations. Not only of themselves but also of their colleagues, because we all wanted to deliver the very best for our clients. And what's great about me joining Blockchain is that we have all of the very same dedication to excellence but now while operating on the cutting edge of what we view as the future of finance.

'Blockchains will completely reengineer the way we operate'

Peterson: What attracted you to making the switch from traditional banking to cryptocurrencies?

Madigan: I think it's becoming increasingly clear that blockchains will completely reengineer the way we operate in the future, broadly speaking. And I think for this next phase of my career, I am really focused on building new businesses, on partnering with exceptional management teams, and a team that has the vision for the future of the financial system. I'm delighted to say that Blockchain really exceeded every aspect of my goals in this regard.

We're innovating at the cusp of a whole new ecosystem that we believe will change the way that we operate in the future. I'm very thrilled to be a part of their story from the early days, and very much looking forward to helping develop the strategy but also building the products that will really be the foundation of the industry going forward.

Peterson: How did you first learn about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology?

Madigan: Just anecdotally — reading and learning more about the market, getting excited by talking to colleagues at Goldman. I think a lot of people have said that it's a proverbial rabbit hole — the more you read, the more excited you get.

I've done small investments here and there, and I'm just really excited about the growth potential of the market. And I think Blockchain is the optimal place to position myself to really be a part of the early parts of the growth of this industry and ecosystem.

There is still a lot to 'iron out' in crypto for institutional investors

Peterson: You've spent the last three years of your time at Goldman working closely with institutional investors. What do you see as some of hurdles or barriers to entry for newcomers to crypto?

Madigan: A lot of the traditional financial markets are very mature, so when you're a core institutional investor who operates with governing rules around your fund, and return expectations, it's a little more cookie-cutter.

In an emerging market like cryptocurrency there is still a lot to be ironed out. But we are really well-positioned in terms of interpreting what is currently available from a regulatory perspective, and making sure that we're really operating as open and accessibly as we can, and innovating as we get more clarity around the regulatory landscape.

But since it's not as cookie cutter as the developed liquid markets, some of the institutional investors are looking for more clarity around the rules and the market place before they jump in.

Peterson: Once you start talking to these investors, how do you persuade them to work with startup like Blockchain versus a larger bank like Goldman?

Madigan: We really built the best team of thought leaders who are really mindful of the regulatory environment and the risks associated with building new platforms in a market like this that is evolving every day.

Ultimately, it's about these institutional investors learning more about the market and getting more comfortable with their management teams. And I have 100% confidence that as we bring in more institutional investors, they'll realize that the quality of this team and the quality of our offering, and I don't think we'll have quite the hurdle that maybe you're anticipating now.

Joining Blockchain means being on the 'cusp of innovation'

Peterson: It seems like a lot bankers are already convinced that blockchain is the future. We seem report frequently on people leaving large banks and firms to join crypto startups. Why do you think this is?

Madigan: It's becoming increasingly clear by the day that blockchain technology really has the capacity to fundamentally change how the global financial system works, and that's obviously quite exciting and motivating.

I think the opportunity, for those of us who have been in more of a legacy business for a long time, to now to be on the cusp of innovation, and to really be part of literally building the future of finance; it's a really intriguing proposition.

I'm really most excited to be doing this specifically at Blockchain based on the quality of the team. I think everybody has this clear, shared vision of building a radically better financial system, and when you think about the impact that our company software has had already, we offer the largest production blockchain platform in the world, which has powered over 100 million transactions already and empowered users in 140 companies across the globe.

So I think people from Wall Street would naturally be excited by an opportunity to be involved in this type of emerging ecosystem, and especially the opportunity to work at a company like Blockchain.

Peterson: In terms of the future of finance, what do you think will be some of the biggest changes that we see to the financial system in the long term?

Madigan: We all agree that transformation doesn't happen over night. It's very much in the early stages of both crypto and our company, so a lot remains to be seen. Having said so, I think we're really, already, starting to see the transformation impact that this technology will have on individuals and industries broadly across the globe. We all agree that it will fundamentally reengineer the way we transact and exchange value.

I think we as a company will continue to innovate, and find new ways to serve a great proportion for the world. We have a lot more in store that we will share in the coming days and weeks.