The Long Now Thinks Very Far Ahead
In the U.S., people often measure “success” as fifteen minutes of fame, or a blockbuster financial quarter. This focus on short term results doesn’t always build the skills needed to solve long-term problems, such as reducing disease outbreaks or maintaining species diversity. Concerns about the nation’s short attention span have prompted some visionaries to create a playfully serious way to think ahead. From San Francisco, Shelley Schlender reports about the Long Now Foundation.
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First Afghan Women’s Orchestra Tries to Change Attitudes
Afghanistan’s first – and only – all-female symphony is trying to change attitudes in a deeply conservative country where many see music as immoral, especially for women.
The symphony’s two conductors show how difficult that can be, but also how satisfying success is.
One of them, Negin Khpolwak, was supported by her father when she joined the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and then became part of its girls’ orchestra, called Zohra. But the rest of her family was deeply against it. Her uncles cut off ties with her father.
“They told him he is not their brother anymore,” said Khpolwak, now 20. “Even my grand-mother disowned my father.”
Khwolpak had learned about the music institute at the orphanage in Kabul where she spent most of her life. Her father sent her to the orphanage because he was afraid for her safety in their home province of Kunar in eastern Afghanistan, an area where Taliban militants are active.
The institute is one of the only schools in Afghanistan where girls and boys share classrooms, and it draws its students from the ranks of orphanages and street children, giving them a chance at a new life. Khpolwak studied piano and drums before becoming the orchestra’s conductor.
First international tour
More than 30 girls aged 12 to 20 play in Zohra, which is named after a goddess of music in Persian literature. In January, the orchestra, which performs traditional Afghan and Western Classical music, had its first international tour, appearing at the World Economic Forum in Davos and four other cities in Switzerland and Germany.
“The formation of the orchestra is aimed at sending a positive message to the community, to send a positive message to the girls, to encourage families and girls to join the music scene of the country,” said Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the institute’s founder and director.
Sarmast has experienced firsthand the militants’ hatred of music. In 2014, a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up at a concert Sarmast was attending. He was wounded and a German man in the audience died.
The Zohra orchestra was created in 2014 when one of the institute’s students, a girl named Meena, asked Sarmast if there could be a group where girls could play together. Sarmast leaped at the idea.
Since then, Meena has disappeared. Last year, the 7th grader told the school she had to attend her sister’s wedding in her family’s village in eastern Nangarhar province. She never returned, a sign of how tenuous people’s situation is in a country where war rages, communications are poor and poverty is rife. Sarmast said the school has not been in contact with her, but he’s hopeful she’ll return to the school and Zohra.
The orchestra’s other conductor, 18-year-old Zarifa Adiba, faced resistance from her family just as Khpolwak did.
Societal barriers
When she joined the school in 2014, she only told her mother and step-father, not her four brothers and her uncles, because she knew they would disapprove. Her mother and step-father tried to tell them about the importance of music – without mentioning Adiba – but they weren’t convinced.
“If my brothers and uncles had known about me learning or playing music, they 100 percent would have stopped me because they had a very negative view toward music,” Adiba said.
Her family’s opposition to music was so intense she hesitated to join the orchestra’s trip to Davos. But she ended up going, and as one of the conductors she was widely interviewed in the media there and appeared on TV.
When she returned, her uncles were the first to congratulate her. Two of her brothers are still not happy about her involvement with music but now she has the support of the rest of the family, she has more courage, and she said she is sure her brothers will eventually come around.
“I changed my family, now it is time for other girls to change their families because I am sure that slowly all Afghanistan will change,” she said.
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Trove of Susan B. Anthony Letters Lands at New York College
A college in Susan B. Anthony’s western New York hometown has acquired a trove of 19th-century letters she wrote to a fellow leader in the women’s rights movement.
The University of Rochester says the collection originally owned by Isabella Beecher Hooker includes dozens of letters from fellow suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The collection is now housed in the university’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation.
The letters were written between 1869 and 1880 to Hooker, a member of a prominent Connecticut family.
The letters were found last year in a wooden box stored at the Bloomfield, Connecticut, home of George and Libbie Merrow. The letters were passed down through the family of George Merrow, whose grandfather owned the former Hooker house in Hartford.
your ad hereFollowing the Footsteps of Generations Along Natchez Trace
In addition to visiting the hallowed battlesite grounds at Vicksburg National Military Park, national parks traveler Mikah Meyer also had the chance to visit several other national park sites in Mississippi, each with its own unique history.
Natchez National Historical Park
Natchez National Historical Park, in the southern part of the state, protects the sites and structures associated with the people of Natchez and its surrounding area — from its earliest inhabitants through the modern era.
The name is derived from the Natchez American Indians who lived along the Mississippi River at the time of European exploration.
But the area is also known for its pre-Civil War history.
Pre-Civil War South
Mikah, who’s on a mission to visit all of the more than 400 national parks, was able to learn about that history and other aspects of life in the antebellum South through many of the city’s preserved properties.
“It’s a historical park, so it’s kind of like the other historical parks in that it’s basically the old portion of the town of Natchez and a bunch of various sites,” he explained.
William Johnson House
Among those sites is the home of William Johnson, who was a free black barber.
“It was interesting to learn about his story,” Mikah recounted. “He lived in Natchez before the Civil War as a free black man and had his own house and his own business as a barber.”
According to the National Park Service, Johnson used bricks from buildings destroyed in the infamous tornado of 1840 to construct the State Street estate and commercial business area. The family lived in the upper stories of the house, while the first floor was rented out to merchants. The house allows visitors to learn more about the life of free African Americans in the pre-Civil War South.
After the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, the Union Army occupied the city of Natchez, enforced the Emancipation Proclamation – which freed all slaves in the rebellious states, and put an end to the tragic sale of enslaved people at the Forks of the Road, one of the largest slave markets in the South.
Subsequently, thousands of formerly enslaved men from the Natchez area joined the U.S. Army and Navy.
Driving through history
It would seem unlikely that a modern-looking expressway would be considered a site worth preserving, but that’s exactly what the National Park Service has done with Natchez Trace Parkway. The 715-kilometer roadway once was the main way settlers and travelers reached Natchez from the Tennessee area.
Driving north on that scenic parkway, Mikah said he understood why the Park Service had chosen to preserve it.
“I drove mile zero of that, all the way up to mile 15, just to get a taste of what that was like,” Mikah recounted. “It’s what a highway in America would look like if there were no Dairy Queens or gas stations on it. It’s just the road, grass and trees, so it’s really pretty — a really beautiful driving experience.”
While it was cold and wintry up north, the grass along the parkway was a vibrant green. “The trees were starting to bloom, so I can only imagine it in peak spring,” Mikah added.
Alongside much of the parkway is the Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail, a historic forest trail that roughly follows sections of the paved road through the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.
Also known as the “Old Natchez Trace,” the trail was created and used for centuries by Native Americans, and later, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, by European and American explorers, traders and emigrants.
Today, visitors like Mikah can still walk those trails and experience the area’s natural beauty.
The “Sunken Trace”
Picturesque land and waterscapes near the trail offer visitors recreational opportunities like hiking, biking, horseback riding and camping.
And Mikah said you can literally see history when you walk the trail, worn down by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of footsteps.
“One of the ways that distinguishes this is there are paths that are very clearly beaten down in that you have essentially a wall on either side of you.”
In the space of a few days, Mikah immersed himself in several fascinating aspects of his country’s history. He says he looks forward to exploring more of it when he visits two more national park sites in the northern part of Mississippi sometime in the near future.
In the meantime, he invites you to learn more about his travels across America by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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Vote to Repeal US Broadband Privacy Rules Sparks Interest in VPNs
The vote by the U.S. Congress to repeal rules that limit how internet service providers can use customer data has generated renewed interest in an old internet technology: virtual private networks, or VPNs.
VPNs cloak a customer’s web-surfing history by making an encrypted connection to a private server, which then searches the Web on the customer’s behalf without revealing the destination addresses. VPNs are often used to connect to a secure business network, or in countries such as China and
Turkey to bypass government restrictions on Web surfing.
Privacy-conscious techies are now talking of using VPNs as a matter of course to guard against broadband providers collecting data about which internet sites and services they are using.
“Time to start using a VPN at home,” Vijaya Gadde, general counsel of Twitter Inc, said in a tweet on Tuesday that was retweeted by Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey.
Gadde was not immediately available for comment. Twitter said she was commenting in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the company.
The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives voted 215-205 on Tuesday to repeal rules adopted last year by the Federal Communications Commission under then-President Barack Obama to require broadband providers to obtain consumer consent before using their data for advertising or marketing.
The U.S. Senate, also controlled by Republicans, voted 50-48 last week to reverse the rules. The White House said President Donald Trump supported the repeal measure.
Supporters of the repeal said the FCC unfairly required internet service providers like AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc to do more to protect customers’ privacy than websites like Alphabet Inc’s
Google or Facebook Inc.
Critics said the repeal would weaken consumers’ privacy protections.
VPN advantages, drawbacks
Protected data includes a customer’s web-browsing history, which in turn can be used to discover other types of information, including health and financial data.
Some smaller broadband providers are now seizing on privacy as a competitive advantage. Sonic, a California-based broadband provider, offers a free VPN service to its customers so they can connect to its network when they are not home. That ensures that when Sonic users log on to wi-fi at a coffee shop or hotel, for example, their data is not collected by that establishment’s
broadband provider.
“We see VPN as being important for our customers when they’re not on our network. They can take it with them on the road,” CEO Dane Jasper said.
In many areas of the country, there is no option to choose an independent broadband provider and consumers will have to pay for a VPN service to shield their browsing habits.
Private Internet Access, a VPN provider, took a visible stand against the repeal measure when it bought a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday. But the company, which boasts about a million subscribers, potentially stands to benefit from the legislation, acknowledged marketing director Caleb Chen.
VPNs have drawbacks. They funnel all user traffic through one point, so they are an attractive target for hackers and spies. The biggest obstacle to their routine use as a privacy safeguard is that they can be too much of a hassle to set up for many customers. They also cost money.
“The further along toward being a computer scientist you have to be to use a VPN, the smaller a portion of the population we’re talking about that can use it,” said Ernesto Falcon, a legislative counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposed the bill.
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The High Cost of Incivility at Work
Workplaces have become less civil spaces than they once were. People don’t say please and thank you. Employees send e-mails and texts during meetings, ignoring the speaker and tuning out of the discussion. Others take too much credit for collaborative work.
The nasty looks and belittling comments reached a point at law firm Bryan Cave, in Irvine, California, that the partners held a civility workshop.
Managing partner Stuart Price says working together toward a common goal set the right tone for the workshop, as the employees set up a code of civil behavior. The firm has the 10 points of the code displayed on a granite block in the lobby.
“I think two items in the code really stand out for me,” Price said. “No. 3 is we treat each other equally and with respect, even if the conditions are very difficult. Then the last item in our code is we address incivility. If you don’t address incivility, then the plaque just becomes a piece of granite, but it doesn’t have life.”
He says they no longer let uncivil behavior slide.
“The first step for us along the way is to address it with the person, privately, just talk about what happened,” he said. “If the pattern continues with that specific person, we will have further conversations and if it’s particularly problematic, we might terminate them.”
Creating a civil work environment has impacted the firm in many positive ways.
“A year after we had this workshop, we won Best Place to Work in Orange County in the large company category,” Price said. “In terms of performance, it seems to me that when we’re most focused on how we treat each other, when were we’re most focused on civility, the financial performance is at its best.”
The High Cost of Incivility
A culture of civility helps employees feel safer, happier and better, said Georgetown University management professor Christine Porath. She incorporated results of her research and personal experiences in a new book, Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace.
She told VOA she witnessed the consequences of incivility years before she started studying it.
“I thought I scored my dream job after my graduating from college,” she said. “I got to work at one of the largest sports marketing organization in the world. When I took the full-time job, I learned that it was a very toxic culture. The top leaders had a bad behavior, narcissism. And they had a tendency to belittle and demean people in front of others.”
Then it became clear to her the negative effect incivility had on people.
“It was contagious, too,” she said. “It affected their performance and motivation and mood throughout the day, but they took that into their relationships with others; clients, customers and that kind of thing. And I just saw that it was hurting the organization. And it was also hurting employees, not only their work life, but they were taking it home with them.”
And, she discovered, incivility had a physical impact.
“Then the second thing was my dad. (He) had had two toxic bosses. Even though he tried to protect me from learning about how bad that was, he ended up in the hospital with a heart attack scare,” she said.
More Rudeness
Porath notes that civility has been declining for years.
“When I started studying it in about 1998, it was less than 25 percent (people) were affected by this on a weekly basis, and those numbers most recently hovered over 50 percent — meaning more people are experiencing or witnessing disrespectful, rude behavior in the workplace these days.”
She conducted surveys, asking people “Why are you uncivil?”
“Over 60 percent of people say, ‘Because I’m overwhelmed or stressed.’ People are asked to do more with less resources. The other thing is technology. The fact that people communicate so often now with e-mails and other forms of technology, it makes being civil tougher in a sense that you don’t have the nonverbal (cues), you don’t have the tone of voice. So typically there are more misunderstandings with technological communication,” she said.
Let’s be e-Civil
To avoid those sorts of misunderstandings, Porath recommends that you do not send an email if you’re feeling very stressed, angry or can’t solve a disagreement. If you’re not sure how your humor, sarcasm or criticism will be received, reread, rethink and resist the temptation to hit Send. And if you are uncertain about your tone, save the message and review it later with a fresh perspective before sending it. If you have to get something off your chest, write your note now but maybe send it later using delayed delivery. Finally, she suggests trying to have a phone call, or Skype, or meet face to face under those circumstances.
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Older Women May Be Predisposed To Be Less Active
Pushing yourself is harder if you are a woman older than 50. Just ask Meschelle Sevier.
“I would rather sit on the couch at home and watch re-runs,” Sevier says.
Annie Green also has noticed that it’s harder for her to exercise than it used to be.
“I would probably run on the treadmill two to three minutes and then walk. Now it’s down to one or two minutes.”
Staying active is harder
As women age, it seems to become more challenging to stay active, and this inactivity could lead to weight gain and a host of health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and Type-2 diabetes. The rate of some chronic diseases increases around the time a woman goes through menopause.
Scientists, including Victoria Vieira-Potter at the University of Missouri, are trying to figure out why women become less active as they age and what can be done to promote physical activity.
Vieira-Potter noticed a link between weight gain and the loss of estrogen in lab rats after their ovaries were removed.
However, she also noted that the female rats that exercised and were fit before their ovaries were removed did not gain weight. Vieira-Potter theorized that healthy exercise regimens might protect postmenopausal women from weight gain and its health complications.
Be aware and adjust
Vieira-Potter also theorized that a drop in estrogen leads to a drop in the chemical dopamine that sends signals to the pleasure or reward center in the brain, so women get less pleasure from exercising, and they put on weight.
The key, she said, is for older women to be aware of these changes and to adjust their lifestyles accordingly.
“We don’t need a lot of activity,” she said, “Women don’t need to take up marathon running because they’re going through menopause.”
Although the research did not involve humans, scientists say animal models are useful.
A different theory
Dawn Lowe studies aging and exercise at the University of Minnesota. She is involved in a large study of premenopausal and postmenopausal women that includes researchers from a spectrum of disciplines.
These scientists are looking at activity in older women from a different angle. They want to see how women’s health influences physical activity. As women age, they can lose control of their bladders. That lack of control at unexpected moments causes some women to stop exercising because exercise can be one of the causes of incontinence.
“The pelvic floor is composed of muscles. We think about leg muscles becoming weaker with age in men and women, but the pelvic floor is also a muscle. There is growing evidence that that muscle becomes weak with age as well,” Lowe told VOA in a Skype interview.
The result can be involuntary urinary or fecal incontinence, especially during exercise. Nearly 40 percent of the women in the study experienced incontinence. Lowe said there’s growing evidence, particularly for women, that estrogen affects how that muscle works.
Lowe says over the next several years, we can expect to learn a lot about women’s health and how it changes through the menopausal years, with the hope of keeping women active and healthy.
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The Brain and Muscles May Predispose Older Women to Be Less Active
Why does physical activity become harder for some older women? Researchers are studying that very question to help women stay active and healthy as they age. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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Advanced Trash-to-Fuel Plant Goes Online in Israel
While President Trump’s latest executive order gives renewed life to power plants that burn coal, energy companies continue to seek and find alternative, less expensive and cleaner sources of fuel. One possibility is turning trash into fuel in an environmentally responsible way. VOA’s George Putic reports that authorities in Tel Aviv say their new garbage processing plant is on track to produce as much as 500 tons of fuel daily.
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Bob Dylan Archives Open in Oklahoma; Public Center Planned
Part of music icon Bob Dylan’s once-secret 6,000-piece archive, including thousands of hours of studio sessions, film reels and caches of unpublished lyrics, has opened in Oklahoma.
More than 1,000 pieces of the collection spanning Dylan’s six-decade career are available to scholars at the Gilcrease Museum’s Helmerich Center for American Research in Tulsa.
The opening comes a year after the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa acquired the collection for an estimated $15 million to $20 million.
The public will get a glimpse of some of the material when the Bob Dylan Center opens in downtown Tulsa’s Brady Arts District in about two years.
The center will occupy the opposite side of a building that houses a center devoted to Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s major influences.
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Cruise Digs Up a Monster in ‘The Mummy’
Universal Pictures is going back to its roots — monsters.
The studio Wednesday debuted footage from its upcoming adventure film The Mummy, which opens a monster universe drawing on Universal’s vault of classic properties like Bride of Frankenstein, Invisible Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Tom Cruise stars in the Alex Kurtzman-directed The Mummy, which is equal parts action and horror as Cruise’s explorer Nick Morton attempts to combat an ancient evil that has been unlocked and threatens to destroy the world.
Sofia Boutella is the Mummy, once an Egyptian princess who turned to the dark side when denied the throne.
Kurtzman and the cast, including Boutella, Annabelle Wallis and Jake Johnson, discussed Cruise’s famous commitment to eye-popping stunts.
“I think I was brought onto this movie to be afraid to do stunts with Tom Cruise,” Johnson said. “Tom does it all and he makes his co-stars do it, too. And I do mean ‘make.”’
Johnson laughed that when he would complain when he got hurt or bruised, Cruise would quip back: “Yeah, we jumped off a building dummy. It hurts!”
Cruise, who is on location for another filming, delivered a video message to the audience.
“My love for this began with universal classic films,” Cruise said. “To usher in a new age of gods and monsters is something that makes me very proud and excited.”
Audiences can meet “the original monster” June 9.
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Study Finds Correlation Between Good Health, Economic Prospects
A study by U.S. economic experts and a major health insurance company says a healthy population is a key ingredient in a healthy and growing economy.
Blue Cross and Moody’s Analytics used data from millions of insurance customers to draw a statistical relationship between health and prosperity in the United States.
In counties throughout the 50 states where the population had top health scores, per capita incomes were nearly $4,000 a year higher than in counties where people had just average health scores.
Unemployment showed a similar pattern: The healthiest counties had a jobless rate eight-tenths of a percent better than communities where health was average. Economic growth also was measurably stronger in the healthiest areas.
The report’s authors cautioned that the statistical correlation did not prove that healthier people cause a stronger economy, but it did make researchers suspect that such a relationship exists. The report also noted that healthier people lose less time from work and bring better skills to the job, because they didn’t miss school lessons.
Obamacare debate
The report came in the midst of a long-running national debate among American lawmakers about how to devise and pay for a system of health insurance.
Since President Donald Trump took office, his Republican Party has been planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act that former President Barack Obama signed into law seven years ago, claiming it is ineffective and financially ruinous.
The sentiment among lawmakers in Congress conflicted with many American families’ feelings about the value of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, and a divided Republican majority in Congress proved unable to repeal or replace the law.
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Meningitis Outbreak Kills 269 in Nigeria
Meningitis has killed 269 people in Nigeria in recent weeks, the country’s Center for Disease Control said, as Africa’s most populous country and aid organizations try to tackle the surge in infections.
As of Monday, 1,828 suspected cases of meningitis had been reported, with deaths recorded in 15 of the country’s 36 states, the center said late Tuesday on Twitter.
The center said on its website that 33 people died of meningitis in 2016.
More than 2,000 people died from an outbreak of the disease in Nigeria in 2009, with basic health care limited in rural parts of the country. Most rural residents live on less than $2 a day, despite the country’s huge oil resources.
Meningitis is the inflammation of tissue surrounding the brain and spinal cord, which can be caused by viral or bacterial infections. It spreads mainly through kisses, sneezes and coughs, and in close living quarters.
The center said it was working with the World Health Organization, the U.N. children’s fund and Doctors Without Borders to try to control the outbreak.
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Rare Image of Harriet Tubman to Be Auctioned in New York
A photograph of Harriet Tubman, believed to be the earliest-known image of the anti-slavery crusader and showing her as younger than she is normally depicted, will go up for auction Thursday in New York.
The photograph, previously unseen by scholars, shows Tubman in her late 40s, wearing an intricately decorated blouse and voluminous skirt, and sitting in a chair, leaning one arm on its back.
“It’s quite remarkable: This is what she looked like in her prime Civil War period when she was working as a spy for Lincoln,” Wyatt Day, the specialist organizing the sale at Swann Auction Galleries, said in a telephone interview.
He noted the photograph was taken about three years after the American Civil War ended in 1865. “All of the images show her as an older woman, maybe in her 70s. She looks a bit tired, and here she looks vibrant and strong.”
Kate Clifford Larson, a historian and Tubman biographer, said the photograph, which was brought to Swann last year after being purchased at auction by a collector of vintage photos about 10 years ago, could help the public “reimagine” Tubman.
“There are so many details about it that are thrilling,” she said in a phone interview. “She’s so much younger and she’s dressed so beautifully, so it helps us look at her in a different way.”
Tubman, who escaped from slavery in Maryland when she was in her 20s, later led dozens of black slaves to freedom using the Underground Railroad and became a Union Army spy during the Civil War and women’s suffragist.
The U.S. Treasury Department said last year it planned to put her on the face of the $20 bill, replacing former President Andrew Jackson, making her the first African-American so honored.
The photograph for auction is in the form of a carte de visite, a 19th-century custom in which people would leave photos of themselves as a calling card.
It appears in a carte-de-visite album compiled by the Quaker abolitionist Emily Howland. The album is estimated to sell for $20,000 to $30,000, the gallery said.
Day said research had shown the photographer Benjamin F. Powelson, who made Tubman’s carte de visite, only spent time near Tubman’s home in Auburn in upstate New York from 1868 to 1869, when Tubman was about 48.
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Vice Media Hopes Its Edgy Journalism Will Play Well in Mideast
Vice Media is bringing its edgy style of journalism to the Middle East to tap what it thinks is an underserved market of young, digital-hungry consumers.
Vice announced its arrival with a party Wednesday at the glitzy Armani Hotel in the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, the global trade hub where the New York-based company will set up its regional headquarters.
Vice reckons the region’s youthful population coupled with some of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates make it an ideal market to expand into.
“We think that this is the time that we come in and steal a lot of market share,” Vice Chief Executive Shane Smith told Reuters in an interview Wednesday.
Vice, which is aiming for 50 staff members in Dubai by the end of the year, will launch a website and digital channel this summer and is discussing a 24-hour regional cable channel to be broadcast from the emirate. The company will produce news and lifestyle content in multiple languages including Arabic, English, Farsi, Turkish and Urdu.
Vice has documented migrant worker abuses in Dubai, won acclaim for a documentary while embedded with Islamic State and garnered widespread attention when it took former National Basketball Association star Dennis Rodman to North Korea.
‘Right side of history’
“We’re always going to be looking at social justice, we’re always going to be looking at environmental justice, we’re always going to be looking at being on the right side of history, especially with millennials and our audience,” Smith said.
Vice is likely to run into the same obstacles it has faced elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, “where journalists are most subjected to constraints of every kind,” according to global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.
Worth $4.2 billion at its last valuation, Vice has transformed in 23 years from a punk magazine in Montreal, Quebec, into a global multimedia brand.
Its regional partner is Afghan media company Moby Group, whose Dubai offices are a few kilometres from the Trump International Golf Club, which was featured in a 2016 Vice episode on U.S. cable channel HBO about migrant worker exploitation.
Vice and Moby share a common shareholder in 21st Century Fox, and the Afghan company holds a license from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, allowing it to expand into Iran — a market Vice wants to tap.
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Tackling Global Health Care: Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Imagine a vaccine vial with a temperature-sensitive label that changes colors when exposed to excessive heat.
That’s the sort of technology that can make a huge difference for doctors working in challenging conditions, allowing them to determine at-a-glance whether heat-sensitive vaccines are viable.
The vaccine vial monitor is one of the projects at the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), an international nonprofit based in Seattle with more than 22 offices around the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
The organization partners with foundations, non-governmental organizations and governments to expedite the development of global health solutions such as vaccines, drugs and medical devices. PATH’s aim is to help deliver breakthroughs in drug and medical devices on a global scale.
Tribendimidine (TrBD) is one of those potential breakthroughs — a drug treatment for soil-transmitted helminths, or intestinal worm infections.
According to the World Health Organization, over 1.5 billion people, or 24 percent of the global population, have acquired soil-transmitted helminths infections. Tropical and subtropical regions of the world are most affected, with the highest rates of incidences in sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, China and East Asia.
The development of new drugs like TrBD helps deter increasing resistance to existing drugs, when used in tandem with or as a replacement for these drugs.
Advice for entrepreneurs
David Shoultz, program leader for drug development at PATH, considers three factors essential to the long-term success of health care solutions, and advises aspiring entrepreneurs to keep them in mind: demand, cost and consumer-oriented product design.
“Unless we understand what the user is looking for and if we can then actually project what the demand will be … any technology, no matter how good it is, is likely to fall flat,” he said.
Shoultz recommends entrepreneurs find partners who can be a bridge into the global health arena.
“It may be that the entrepreneur truly does have a brilliant idea and it’s already available in a different setting,” he said. Organizations like PATH and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can help filter and shape ideas, along with facilitating important industry connections.
Cost is another important consideration for entrepreneurs. Medical technologies developed in high-income countries can be less accessible to those in middle- or low-income countries, which is why Shoultz advises entrepreneurs to keep prices as low as possible.
For example, PATH’s drug for soil-transmitted helminths will sell for $0.06 to $0.07 cents a tablet.
“To be honest, there are comparable drugs that are even a little bit less expensive than that,” noted Shoultz, “We’re constantly trying to think of, OK, how could we make it even a little bit less expensive.'”
WATCH: Shoultz Talks about Common Mistakes by Entrepreneurs
Ultra Rice
Global entrepreneurs should also consider end-users not just as patients, but as consumers, Shoultz said.
“Sometimes we think about consumers or users in low-income settings as being very utilitarian, and in fact, my experience … is that they’re looking for the same thing that all of us are looking for in consumer goods — they do want to be excited and delighted,” he said.
To that end, PATH developed a rice fortification technology called Ultra Rice in which grains made from rice flour are fortified with vitamins and minerals and produced to resemble real rice grains. The Ultra Rice grains are then mixed with local, natural rice supplies to significantly boost their nutritional value.
The product aids those around the world suffering from micronutrient deficiencies, of which the United Nations World Food Program says there are 2 billion.
“I think really understanding the consumer impulse … is critically important, rather than just imagining that we’re going to build drab or utilitarian tools, because that’s not very exciting to consumers, regardless of their income level,” Shoultz said.
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At Last: Bob Dylan to Receive Nobel Prize in Stockholm
Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan will receive his Nobel Literature Prize diploma and medal in the next few days in Stockholm, where is he due to perform this weekend, the secretary of the Swedish Academy said on Wednesday.
The Academy’s decision to give the bard of “Blowin’ in the Wind” the literature prize caused controversy, only deepened by Dylan’s silence about the award for weeks afterwards and his no-show at the annual banquet in December.
“The good news is that the Swedish Academy and Bob Dylan have decided to meet this weekend,” Sara Danius said in a blog post. “The Academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
The 75-year-old Dylan is due to give concerts in Stockholm on April 1 and the following day and then another in the southern Swedish city of Lund on April 9.
Danius said that the notoriously media-shy Dylan would not hold the traditional Nobel lecture at this point.
“The Swedish Academy is very much looking forward to the weekend and will show up at one of the performances. Please note that no Nobel Lecture will be held,” Danius wrote.
“The Academy has reason to believe that a taped version will be sent at a later point,” she added.
In order to receive 8 million Swedish crown ($903,000) prize, Dylan needs to give a lecture within six months from December 10. It does not necessarily need not be delivered in Stockholm.
The decision to award the prize to Dylan, whom the Academy said had “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” was seen by some as slap in the face to mainstream writers of poetry and prose.
But the Academy has a tradition of stepping outside the traditional boundaries of literary form, awarding the 1953 prize to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in part for his “brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”
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Silicon Valley Experts Help International Startups Struggling With Growth
When he was growing up in Hyderabad, India, Ravindra Sunku, 52, could see and smell the burning kerosene and wood his neighbors used to cook.
It stuck in his memory people he knew might have suffered from lung disease caused from what they inhaled by doing something as simple as cooking dinner.
Now a tech executive in Silicon Valley, Sunku recently was able to use his professional skills to help a Kenyan organization that makes clean cook stoves that promise to save lives and reduce deforestation.
“I’ve grown up in India. I’ve seen the hardship,” he said. “This could have saved someone in my childhood.”
Sunku volunteered through RippleWorks, a unique mentorship program in Silicon Valley that connects tech professionals with startups around the world that have a social mission.
RippleWorks has helped 28 projects and plans to help 40 more this year. It picks firms that are focused improving education, healthcare, clean energy technology and financial access.
The companies helped include NeoGrowth, a firm in Mumbai, India, that provides access to short-term loans for small businesses. Another is Zoona, which uses technology to provide financial services for people in places such as Malawi and Zambia. In Mexico City, RippleWorks has connected a tech marketing expert with Cignifi, which provides credit to customers via mobile phones.
There are many global mentorship programs and startup incubators bringing together tech experts with entrepreneurs in developing countries. But RippleWorks focuses on advising firms that have already launched and have found their niche.
It offers what its founder calls “mentorship in a box.” The organization identifies a key problem for the companies and pairs them with an expert who has done the job before. Then RippleWorks manages the project, setting up weekly video-conference meetings.
Doug Galen, RippleWorks co-founder and CEO, says the organization’s “secret sauce” is “project management to keep everyone on task.”
Tech Veterans Helping With Growth Hurdles
Sunku’s life took him from Hyderabad to Oklahoma, where he received a masters degree in industrial engineering. He worked in a sheet metal factory near Los Angeles before heading to the San Francisco Bay Area where he worked in software.
As he juggled work and family, Sunku did volunteer stints in his community – all involving physical labor, such as building a playground or stuffing grocery bags for a food bank.
He had not considered that his job skills would be useful as well to a non-profit until he met RippleWorks and began his six-month volunteer stint with Burn Manufacturing in Nairobi, Kenya. Since 2013, Burn has distributed 250,000 clean cook stoves.
Since its launch, Burn had grown big fast, with a factory, employees, products and customers. It needed technology to track and manage everything from sales to payroll to supplies.
That’s where Sunku came in.
Once a week, Sunku arrived at work in San Francisco at 7 a.m. to video conference with the chief financial officer and general manager at Burn. He also worked an additional two hours on the weekend on Burn-related projects and put in an additional hour working with the RippleWorks project manager.
Sunku is director of IT at StitchFix, a digital personalized fashion company. He worked with the Burn team on its needs before acquiring a software system that would enable the organization to run more smoothly. He also helped them create criteria for hiring technical help in Nairobi.
“It took me a bit to get comfortable,” he said. “But once I could see that they were taking to what I was saying, it felt gratifying.”
Sunku’s experience culminated with a trip to Nairobi to work with Burn, which he was able to do because his firm, StitchFix, gives workers unlimited time off.
For Sunku, the experience was eye-opening.
“I never thought someone like me, originally from India who moved to the U.S. and has been in this country for more than 30 years, would make a contribution to Africa.”
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For West Virginia Town, No Wi-Fi, No Problem
Broadband access in the U.S. is not universal. There has long been a digital divide between urban and rural areas. But in one small town just four hours from Washington, D.C., there’s no Wi-Fi internet service at all. The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is the site of the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, so Wi-Fi Internet connections and anything else that can create electromagnetic waves, such as microwave ovens, are banned. VOA’s Lesya Bakalets reports.
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After Trump Rolls Back Environmental Rules, China Reaffirms Climate Change Fight
China said Wednesday it is committed to honoring its pledges under the Paris climate change agreement, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that would effectively dismantle environmental regulations put in place by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said combating climate change is a challenge for the entire world, and that China will maintain its approach even if other governments change their policies.
Trump’s order has rekindled the highly charged partisan debate about how human activity affects the earth’s climate and deepened concern that decades of work on global climate treaties may be unraveling.
“We will put our miners back to work” and produce “really clean coal,” Trump said during the signing ceremony Tuesday.
“Many agree that would be disastrous,” Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen told VOA in a telephone interview. “Whatever has been achieved could be destroyed, so I don’t think many scientists would be pleased with this,” said Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for work explaining the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.
WATCH: Trump orders review of Obama climate rule
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump believes he can balance twin goals of protecting the environment while promoting energy production in the U.S.
“The president strongly believes that protecting the environment and promoting our economy are not mutually exclusive goals,” Spicer said during his daily White House media briefing. “This executive order will help to ensure that we have clean air and clean water without sacrificing economic growth and job creation.
Half-dozen rules
Trump’s order will seek to suspend, rescind or identify for review more than a half-dozen rules, in an attempt to increase domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels. It directs federal agencies to identify rules the administration says impede domestic energy production, as a first step in a 6-month process to create a blueprint for the administration’s future energy policy. Included in the review will be the Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. The rollback also scraps many of former President Barack Obama’s environmental initiatives and removes the requirement that federal officials weigh the impact of climate change when making decisions.
Trump has repeatedly signaled disdain for his predecessor’s climate policy. On the campaign trail, he called Obama’s Clean Power Plan “stupid,” largely because it put in place what he called “job killing” regulations. The executive orders he signed Tuesday direct the Environmental Protection agency to thoroughly revise regulations outlined in the Clean Power Plan.
Trump’s 2018 budget proposal slashes EPA funding by 31 percent, including an almost total cut of climate research funds. Trump’s Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told a White House briefing, “We’re not spending money on that anymore.”
International effect
Less clear is the president’s commitment to international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, signed by Obama. Trump has an aversion to treaties that cede U.S. authority to global bodies, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, called the Paris treaty a “bad deal.”
A hot issue
Leaked details of the executive orders ignited a firestorm among climate scientists.
Tim Barnett, emeritus research geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California says even he, a Trump supporter, would find it “unconscionable” to roll back regulations contained in the Clean Power Plan. “Global warming is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” he said. “If you look at what’s going on the Arctic, the Antarctic, by continuing to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we’re making the oceans more acidic. It is thought that by 2040 half the planktonic creatures will be under stress.”
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune called Trump’s order “the single biggest attack on climate action in U.S. history, period.” Brune said the action ignores the growing clean energy economy that serves as the best way to protect both workers and the environment.
In Washington, views on climate change generally split along party lines. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the views of climate skeptics, largely marginalized during the Obama years, are finding fresh voice.
The House Science Committee has scheduled hearings this week to look into the methods of climate scientists, as Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) pushes forward a bill to require the EPA to make public the data it uses to justify environmental regulations. The hearing will feature three prominent academics who question the scientific consensus, alongside Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the “hockey stick” graph that suggests a steep rise in the earth’s temperature since fossil fuels came into wide use.
Speaking to VOA, Mann said the rising profile of climate change doubters in Washington is part of a well-funded campaign by big energy industry interests, mainly Charles and David Koch, who are major contributors to conservative political and policy groups.
“Trump’s administration has been filled with individuals who have close ties to polluting interests, ExxonMobil obviously, but the Koch brothers, the largest privately owned fossil fuel interests in the country,” Mann said. “… and their agenda has long been to gut all government regulations so they can increase their own profits from the sale of fossil fuels.”
Climate skeptics agree money has corrupted the scientific debate, but they differ on its effect. The dissenters argue that fierce competition for the billions of dollars in government research grants has forced academics to exaggerate the danger of climate chance.
Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, represents the small minority of scientists who find fault with the overwhelming consensus on climate change. He argues universities have given in to the temptation to exaggerate climate change as they have become increasingly dependent on billions of dollars in government research funding, effectively making bureaucrats the real judges of science.
“We went way backward in studying climate and replaced it with this single variable, (CO2) and increased funding by 1500% and created a whole new community that had never studied climate but was willing to attribute everything to it,” he said.
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House Votes to Block Obama-era Online Privacy Rule
The House voted Tuesday to block online privacy regulations issued during the final months of the Obama administration, a first step toward allowing internet providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to sell the browsing habits of their customers.
The Federal Communications Commission rule was designed to give consumers greater control over how internet service providers share information. But critics said the rule would have added costs, stifled innovation and picked winners and losers among Internet companies.
The House voted 215-205 to reject the rule, and sent the legislation to President Donald Trump for his signature. The vote is part of an extensive effort that Republicans have undertaken to void an array of regulations issued during the final months of Democratic President Barack Obama’s tenure. But the vote was closer this time than previous rescind efforts, with 15 Republicans siding with Democrats in the effort to keep the rule in place.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the Republican-led effort was about putting profits over the privacy concerns of Americans.
“Overwhelmingly, the American people do not agree with Republicans that this information should be sold, and it certainly should not be sold without your permission,” Pelosi said. “Our broadband providers know deeply personal information about us and our families.”
Internet companies like Google don’t have to ask users’ permission before tracking what sites they visit. Republicans and industry groups have blasted that discrepancy, saying it was unfair and confusing for consumers.
But proponents of the privacy measure argued that the company that sells you your internet connection can see even more about consumers, such as every website they visit and whom they exchange emails with.
Undoing the FCC regulation leaves people’s online information in a murky area. Experts say federal law still requires broadband providers to protect customer information — but it doesn’t spell out how or what companies must do. That’s what the FCC rule aimed to do.
The Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, Ajit Pai, is a critic of the broadband privacy rules and has said he wants to roll them back. He and other Republicans want a different federal agency, the Federal Trade Commission, to police privacy for both broadband companies like AT&T and internet companies like Google. GOP lawmakers said they cared about consumer privacy every bit as much as Democrats did.
“What America needs is one standard across the internet ecosystem and the Federal Trade Commission is the best place for that standard,” said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.
Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said the FTC has acted as America’s online privacy regulator since the dawn of the internet. He called the rule an effort to strip the agency of that role.
“The internet has become the amazing tool that it is because it is largely left untouched by regulation — and that shouldn’t stop now,” McCarthy said.
Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas parted ways with his Republican colleagues on the issue. He said the privacy protections were “commonsense measures” that would have ensured internet users continue to have control over their personal information.
“We don’t want the government having access to our information without our consent, and the same goes for private business,” Yoder said.
Broadband providers don’t currently fall under FTC jurisdiction, and advocates say the FTC has historically been a weaker agency than the FCC.
The American Civil Liberties Union urged Trump to veto the resolution, appealing to his populist side.
“President Trump now has the opportunity to veto this resolution and show he is not just a president for CEOs but for all Americans,” said the ACLU’s Neema Singh Guliani.
Republicans repeatedly discounted the privacy benefits generated by the rule. Over the last two months, they’ve voted to repeal more than a dozen Obama-era regulations in the name of curbing government overreach. The criticism of their efforts was particularly harsh Tuesday.
“Lawmakers who voted in favor of this bill just sold out the American people to special interests,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.
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US Vote to Repeal Broadband Privacy Rules Sparks Interest in VPNs
The vote by the U.S. Congress to repeal rules that limit how internet service providers can use customer data has generated renewed interest in an old internet technology: virtual private networks, or VPNs.
VPNs cloak a customer’s web-surfing history by making an encrypted connection to a private server, which then searches the Web on the customer’s behalf without revealing the destination addresses. VPNs are often used to connect to a secure business network, or in countries such as China and Turkey to bypass government restrictions on Web surfing.
Privacy-conscious techies are now talking of using VPNs as a matter of course to guard against broadband providers collecting data about which internet sites and services they are using.
“Time to start using a VPN at home,” Vijaya Gadde, general counsel of Twitter Inc, said in a tweet on Tuesday that was retweeted by Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey.
Gadde was not immediately available for comment. Twitter said she was commenting in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the company.
The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives voted 215-205 on Tuesday to repeal rules adopted last year by the Federal Communications Commission under then-President Barack Obama to require broadband providers to obtain consumer consent before using their data for advertising or marketing.
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Sensitivity to Certain Sounds Is a Real Thing
Do you ever shudder when you hear certain sounds, such as rustling of some type of plastic bags or a fork scraping on the bottom of a porcelain plate? Or get a tingling in your teeth when somone scrapes their fingernails on a blackboard?
It may be a mild annoyance for most, but a serious problem for people with “misophonia,” from the Greek words meaning hatred of sound.
No matter how tolerant we are, most of us feel uncomfortable if a person sitting close to us in a quiet cinema starts noisily opening a bag of chips and loudly eating them.
But for some people, who suffer from misophonia, certain repetitive noise can be hardly bearable.
“Mainly sounds made by people’s mouth or breathing. This is certain speech sounds, chewing, certain other sort of noisy wet noises from the mouth, noisy breathing as well. Other ones include things like repetitive noises, pen clicking, foot tapping, keyboards sometimes, packets rustling,” Will Sedley of New Castle University said.
Physical evidence?
Scientists at the Newcastle University wanted to see whether there is a physical evidence of this sensitivity.
Volunteers were asked to rate the level of unpleasantness of different sounds from neutral, such as rainfall or the sound of boiling water, to irritating, like noisy eating, loud breathing or a baby crying.
Their brain scans showed that misophonia has to do with the size of an area in our brains that regulates emotional responses.
“It was smaller and less developed in people with misophonia at a group level. Nothing you’d see on an individual brain screen basis, but suggesting that there may actually be brain structural alterations,” Sedley said.
But the discovery opened new questions.
“It’s difficult to know which is the chicken and which is the egg, whether this is the cause of misophonia or in part, or whether this is the consequence of having this condition or an unpleasant adversant condition like this and how it affects the brain in the long term,” he said.
Scientists say they also want to find out whether severe misophonia is treatable, but they say everybody should be aware that some people are genuinely sensitive to certain noises.
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Sensitivity to Certain Sounds Is a Thing
Do you ever shudder when you hear certain sounds, such as rustling of some type of plastic bags or a fork scraping on the bottom of a porcelain plate? Or get a tingling in your teeth when somone scrapes their fingernails on a blackboard? A mild annoyance for most, but a serious problem for people with “misophonia,” from the Greek words meaning hatred of sound. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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