Scientists Study Whether Virtual Reality Can Prevent Cognitive Decline, Dementia
For three days a week, Wayne Garcia has been getting an unconventional workout. He starts by putting on a virtual reality (VR) headset. He then gets on a specially designed exercise bike and starts peddling. He is taking part in a study at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine to see if a dose of VR can help prevent age-related cognitive decline and dementia.“It’s very scary that one day that could be me. Grandparents both had dementia. My father, he had dementia, as well, and my mom has dementia,” said Garcia, who painfully remembered his father reading the newspaper upside down and almost setting the house on fire by putting a towel on the heater.“Just the sadness — you remember what your dad was like, what your mom was like when they were all good, and then the decline now. And now you’re taking care of them rather than when they used to take care of you,” Garcia said.
Scientists Study Whether Virtual Reality Can Prevent Cognitive Decline, Dementia video player.
FILE – Living a healthy lifestyle can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s or other dementia, even if you have a genetic risk, a large study found.Targeting risk factorsThe VR study targets some of the risk factors of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive dysfunction, which include a sedentary lifestyle and lack of cognitive and social stimulation. The VR study exercises the participants’ body and brain at the same time, challenging the memory and decision-making part of their brain.Participants have to pedal on the exercise bike and keep their heart rate up. In the VR experience, they are trying to learn and remember a route while picking up food items by hitting the brakes, then feeding the food to some animals.“Understanding changes in the brain that happen with exercise, changes in the brain that happen when you’re in an enriched environment and putting those two together, and that’s what our intervention is currently targeting,” Pa said.Even if virtual reality can help, it may not be for everyone. In a feasibility study, 4 out of 20 people withdrew from the research because of symptoms of motion sickness. Pa will be conducting trials over the next year with participants who are 50 to 80 years old to gather additional data.Garcia has high hopes for what VR might mean for the future.“There might be a place where you could go, and you can get your daily dose of virtual reality and cardio to keep the mind going,” he said.Still, in the early stages of research, the goal is to prevent or even delay the onset of cognitive decline so people can have a solid quality of life during their golden years.
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Scientists Study Whether Virtual Reality Can Prevent Cognitive Decline, Dementia
People around the world are living longer according to the World Health Organization. By 2020 there will be more people who are 60 or older than children younger than 5. Many adult children are painfully seeing their parents experience cognitive decline and symptoms of dementia. What if virtual reality, or VR, can help prevent or delay the onset of cognitive decline? VOA’s Elizabeth Lee visits one VR lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with the details.
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Coney Island Sandcastle Offers Rooms for Rent
Anyone who has tried booking interesting and affordable accommodations in New York City knows how difficult it is. Renting a room for less than $30 a night sounds impossible. But it’s true, even if the accommodations are a bit… unconventional. Elena Wolf has the story narrated by Anna Rice.
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Marijuana Use by US College Students Is Up, Highest in 35 Years
U.S. college students are using marijuana at the highest rates in 35 years, according to a report released Thursday.About 43% of full-time college students said they used some form of pot at least once in the past year, up from 38%, a University of Michigan survey found. About 25% said they did so in the previous month, up from 21%.The latest figures are the highest levels seen in the annual survey since 1983.About 6% of college students said they used marijuana 20 or more times in the past month. For adults the same age who weren’t enrolled in college, the figure was 11%.”It’s the frequent use we’re most worried about” because it’s linked to poor academic performance and can be detrimental to mental health, said John Schulenberg, one of the Michigan researchers.College-age adults are the biggest users of marijuana than any other age group. Use among high school students has been flat for a few years.The 2018 findings are based on responses from about 1,400 adults age 19 to 22, including 900 who were full-time college students and about 500 who were not.The survey only has comparable data on college kids going back to 1980. So it doesn’t say how common marijuana use was in the 1960’s and 1970’s — a time when marijuana use on college campuses was considered widespread.Marijuana use has been rising in college-age kids for more than a decade. Schulenberg said it seems to be tied to views about risk — in the early 1990s, about three-quarters of young adults said pot was risky. But last year it was down to 22%.The survey also found about 11% of college students said they vaped marijuana in the previous month — more than double the figure in the 2017 survey.
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India Loses Communication with Unmanned Moon Lander
India’s space agency says it has lost communication with its unmanned spacecraft that was set to touch down Saturday on the moon’s south pole.”Communications from lander to ground station was lost,” said K Sivan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. “The data is being analyzed.”
It is not clear if the mission had failed.A successful landing would make India just the fourth country to land a vessel on the lunar surface, and only the third nation to operate a robotic rover there.The roughly $140 million mission, known as Chandrayaan-2, is intended to study permanently shadowed moon craters that are thought to contain water deposits that were confirmed by the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008.
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American Values Shifting in a Big Way
The values that Americans view as important have shifted over the last two decades, as younger Americans place less significance on patriotism, religion and having children.A recent poll shows that 42% of Millennials and Generation Z (ages of 18-38) view patriotism as “very important” compared to almost 79% of people over age 55. Hard work is the attribute all Americans value the most with 89% of respondents saying it’s a very important quality. Tolerance for others, financial security and self-fulfillment also topped the list.Overall, about half of people — 48% — say religion is very important to them, down from 62 percent in 1998. While 67% of older Americans view religion or a belief in God as very important, just 30% of the younger group felt the same. Click on graphic to enlargeWhen it comes to having children, 43% say it’s very important. That’s down from 20 years ago, when 59% of people said that becoming a parent was very important.Forty percent of people say increasing diversity and tolerance of different cultures and races is a step forward, 14% see it as a step backward, while the biggest majority, 43%, say it is both a step forward and a step backward. Issues like religion and patriotism have traditionally been politically important. However, the changing views of the emerging generation suggest those topics might not be at the forefront in the coming years and politicians will have to adjust their platforms and strategies accordingly. The NBC News Wall Street Journal survey of 1,000 adults was conducted from August 10 to August 14.Main photo courtesy of Flickr user Rob Briscoe via Creative Commons license.
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Huawei Debuts Latest Advanced Chipset for Smartphone
Chinese tech giant Huawei unveiled its latest advanced chipset Friday ahead of the upcoming launch of its latest flagship smartphone, even as uncertainty hangs over whether the device can use Google’s Android.
Huawei’s consumer business CEO, Richard Yu, showed off the Kirin 990 chipset at the IFA consumer electronics fair Friday in Berlin.
Optimized for new 5G networks and packing 10.3 billion transistors into its fingernail size, the Kirin 990 will be the brain powering the Mate 30 phone.
Huawei, the world’s No. 2 smartphone maker, plans a global launch for the phone in Munich, Germany, on Sept. 19.
But with the U.S.-China trade war raging, it’s unclear whether the device can use the Android operating system. Sanctions bar U.S. companies from selling technology to Huawei without government approval, though there are 90-day exemptions for a narrow list of products and services.Yu revealed little about the Mate 30 as he showcased the company’s other products. He touted the new chip’s lower energy use and superfast 5G download speed.
“This is the latest semiconductor technology,” he said.Huawei has developed its Kirin line of chips to power some of its phones and reduce reliance on U.S.-based Qualcomm Corp.’s Snapdragon and other foreign suppliers. It has also built its own operating system, Hongmeng, though executives have said they hope to be able to keep using Android.U.S.-China rivalryThe U.S. and China are locked in tech and economic rivalry, with Washington pressuring allies to ban Huawei, the world’s biggest supplier of telecom gear, from new 5G networks.Beijing on Friday lambasted the U.S. opposition to Huawei after Vice President Mike Pence this week called on Iceland and other governments to find alternatives.Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang accused American leaders of “abusing the concept of national security” to block Chinese commercial activity.
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NY Attorney General Announces Facebook Antitrust Probe
New York Attorney General Letitia James says a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general is investigating Facebook for alleged antitrust issues.The Democrat said Friday the probe will look into whether Facebook’s actions endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices or increased the price of advertising.Facebook had no immediate comment.James said she is leading a coalition that includes the attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia.
The U.S. Justice Department announced in July that it was opening a sweeping antitrust investigation of Big Tech, though it did not name any specific companies. It said it was investigating whether online platforms have hurt competition, suppressed innovation or otherwise harmed consumers.
The House Judiciary Committee is also conducting an antitrust probe into Facebook, Amazon and Apple.
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WHO Teams With Facebook Against Social Media Vaccine Misinformation
The World Health Organization has reached an agreement with Facebook to direct millions of users to WHO sites where they can get accurate information about vaccines.WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib tells VOA that misinformation about vaccines is a global health threat that could reverse decades of progress made in tackling preventable illnesses.”Consider for example, when WHO is doing a campaign on polio in Pakistan or yellow fever in Africa,” she said. “You can see a lot of misinformation about the danger of vaccines. And, we do know that vaccines work. … Without vaccines people will die.” The WHO estimates more than 3 million people die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases. Separately, it estimates vaccines against measles, diphtheria, hepatitis, cholera and other diseases save at least 2 million lives annually. Chaib says the WHO is turning to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and other major online sites to stop false rumors and misinformation about vaccines permeating social media platforms. “We hope to reach all generations with the right information through the digital platforms because this is the way people now get the information they need,” she said. “They will not go directly to the WHO website or read a newspaper. They will go to social media and see what people are saying about vaccines or other things.”But the WHO says the online effort alone is not enough to reverse a globally trending anti-vaccine movement. It says governments and the health sector must take tangible steps to alleviate the concerns of parents.
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Silicon Valley Becomes Punching Bag for Presidential Hopefuls
Democratic presidential candidates are flocking to Silicon Valley but this time it’s different. Once candidates wooed wealthy tech executives at Facebook, Google and other mega companies. Some now attack companies over issues such as data privacy, antitrust and worker rights. Michelle Quinn looked at how this election season reflects the changing views of tech across the United States.
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Cambodian Masked Dance Comes to D.C.
The near extinct masked dance of Lakhon Khol was on display recently, thousands of miles from its birthplace in Cambodia. A group of devoted amateurs brought the ancient dance to the Washington metropolitan. VOA’S Chetra Chap reports.
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Muscle Shoals Sound Studios Founder Jimmy Johnson Dies
FLORENCE, Ala. — Jimmy Johnson, a founder of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios and guitarist with the famed studio musicians “The Swampers,” has died.He was 76. His family announced in a Facebook post that he died Thursday.As a studio musician, recording engineer and record producer, Johnson played a role in iconic hits by Percy Sledge, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd and others.Musician Jason Isbell posted on Twitter, writing “The mighty Jimmy Johnson has passed. A lot of my favorite music wouldn’t exist without him.”’Phenomenal music guy’Bassist and business partner David Hood said Johnson was a “friend who became a brother” and an inspiration to him and countless others in the music business.“Jimmy was just an all-around phenomenal music guy,” Hood said.Johnson began work as a professional guitar player at an early age and became a studio musician with Fame Studio. He later helped found the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, which became a recording destination for well-known artists.According to the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, Johnson’s “distinctive guitar fills” can be heard on the recordings of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, The Staple Singers and others. Johnson also was renowned as a recording engineer working the controls of Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” and the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses” and other hits.Hearing what others didn’tHood said in the studio that Johnson could hear things that others didn’t.“When he first signed Lynyrd Skynyrd, nobody thought anybody would want to hear that,” Hood said of the long-haired group. “But he believed in them, fought for them and never gave up on them.” The group immortalized the Swampers with a reference on “Sweet Home Alabama.”Johnson always remained humble, Hood said, recalling how Johnson’s mother would host home-cooked dinners for “all these rock ‘n’ roll people” in their small home in Sheffield.Johnson’s son, Jay Johnson, wrote on Facebook: “He is gone. Playing music with the angels now.”
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Poll: Most Americans See Weather Disasters Worsening
Nearly three-quarters of Americans see weather disasters, like Hurricane Dorian, worsening and most of them blame global warming to some extent, a new poll finds. And scientists say they’re right. The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey shows 72% of Americans think catastrophic weather is more severe, while 4% see it as less nasty. About one-quarter say those disasters are about as extreme as they always were. Half of those who think weather disasters are worsening say it’s mainly because of man-made climate change, with another 37% who think natural randomness and global warming are equally to blame. The poll was conducted in mid-August before Dorian formed, pummeled the Bahamas and put much of the U.S. East Coast on edge. “We continue to loot our environment and it causes adverse weather,” said John Mohr, 57, a self-described moderate Republican in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he was bracing for Dorian’s arrival. On Tybee Island, Georgia, Tony and Debbie Pagan said they rarely worried about hurricanes after buying their home nearly 50 years ago. Hurricane David in 1979 and Floyd in 1999 threatened them but did little damage. The last four years haven’t been so kind. FILE – Destruction lies in the wake of Hurricane Irma in St. Martin, Sept. 6, 2017.One miss, but two hitsHurricane Matthew raked the island in 2016 and pushed several inches of floodwater into the Pagans’ low-lying house. Hurricane Irma the following year sent 2 feet of water surging into the home. And this year Hurricane Dorian threatened, but didn’t hit. “This is climate change, though President Trump denies that it is,” Tony Pagan, 69, a retired electrician, said as he and his wife finished packing to leave Wednesday. “He needs to open his eyes.” Majorities of adults across demographic groups think weather disasters are getting more severe, according to the poll. College-educated Americans are slightly more likely than those without a degree to say so, 79% versus 69%. But there are wide differences in assessments by partisanship. Nine in 10 Democrats think weather disasters are more extreme, compared with about half of Republicans. Americans this summer also are slightly more likely to say disasters are more severe when compared with a similarly worded question asked after hurricanes in 2013 and 2017. “People are catching up with the science! Extreme events are always partly due to natural variability, but we do think many are increasing in frequency because of climate change,” Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said in an email. FILE – Indian residents queue with plastic containers to get drinking water from a tanker in the outskirts of Chennai, May 29, 2019. An unrelenting heat wave triggered warnings of water shortages and heatstroke in India on June 1.Heat, rainIt’s more than hurricanes. A recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that heat waves are happening more often, are nastier and last longer, while heavy downpours are increasing globally, said NASA and Columbia University climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig. Chris Dennis, 50, a registered nurse and self-described liberal Democrat in Greenville, South Carolina, said he is seeing more intense and more frequent weather disasters than in the past. “Years ago, we didn’t hear of these kinds of storms, at least that frequently,” Dennis said, taking a break from watching the CNN forum on climate change for Democratic presidential candidates. He said he kept noticing the damning statistics on carbon dioxide put in the air, saying the “numbers are cranking up like the national debt clock … that’s pretty significant, what we’re doing to our environment.” Scientific studies indicate a warming world has slightly stronger hurricanes, but they don’t show an increase in the number of storms hitting land, Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach said. He said the real climate change effect causing more damage is storm surge from rising seas, wetter storms dumping more rain and more people living in vulnerable areas. SkepticNot everyone sees climate change making weather worse. Though she’s weary of dealing with storms three of the past four years, Sandy Cason of Tybee Island said she’s not ready to blame climate change. She noted Georgia got hit by several powerful hurricanes in the 1800s. “If you go back and read, it’s a cyclical thing. It really is,” Cason said. “If you read enough about the old storms, I don’t think you can” attribute the most recent storms to climate change. The AP-NORC poll of 1,058 adults was conducted Aug. 15-18 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods and later were interviewed online or by phone.
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‘Deepfake Challenge’ Aims to Detect Phony Video, Other Media
Technology firms and academics have joined together to launch a “deepfake challenge” to improve tools to detect videos and other media manipulated by artificial intelligence.The initiative announced Thursday includes $10 million from Facebook and aims to curb what is seen as a major threat to the integrity of online information.The effort is being supported by Microsoft and the industry-backed Partnership on AI and includes academics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, University of Oxford, University of California-Berkeley, University of Maryland and University at Albany.Tool to detect altered videoIt represents a broad effort to combat the dissemination of manipulated video or audio as part of a misinformation campaign.“The goal of the challenge is to produce technology that everyone can use to better detect when AI has been used to alter a video in order to mislead the viewer,” said Facebook chief technical officer Mike Schroepfer.Schroepfer said deepfake techniques, which present realistic AI-generated videos of people doing and saying fictional things, “have significant implications for determining the legitimacy of information presented online. Yet the industry doesn’t have a great data set or benchmark for detecting them.”The challenge is the first project of a committee on AI and media integrity created by the Partnership on AI, a group whose mission is to promote beneficial uses of artificial intelligence and is backed by Apple, Amazon, IBM and other tech firms and non-governmental organizations.A woman in Washington views a manipulated video, Jan. 24, 2019, that changes what is said by President Donald Trump and former president Barack Obama, illustrating how “deepfake” technology can deceive viewers.Threat to democracyTerah Lyons, executive director of the Partnership, said the new project is part of an effort to stem AI-generated fakes, which “have significant, global implications for the legitimacy of information online, the quality of public discourse, the safeguarding of human rights and civil liberties, and the health of democratic institutions.”Facebook said it was offering funds for research collaborations and prizes for the challenge, and would also enter the competition, but not accept any of the prize money.Oxford professor Philip Torr, one of the academics participating, said new tools are “urgently needed to detect these types of manipulated media.“Manipulated media being put out on the internet, to create bogus conspiracy theories and to manipulate people for political gain, is becoming an issue of global importance, as it is a fundamental threat to democracy,” Torr said in a statement.
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Trump Presents Medal of Freedom to NBA’s Jerry West
President Donald Trump is continuing his run of recognizing American sports greats with the nation’s highest civilian honor.Trump has awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to pro-basketball great Jerry West, formerly of the Los Angeles Lakers, during a White House ceremony.
Trump says West “richly deserved” the medal for his years as a player, general manager and supporter of the nation’s war veterans.The 81-year-old West noted his humble beginnings growing up in West Virginia and where sports has taken him, saying “it never ceases to amaze me the places you can go in this world chasing a basketball.”Last month, Trump awarded the medal to 91-year-old basketball great Bob Cousy. Earlier this year, golfer Tiger Woods received the same honor.
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Nessie Unmasked? Loch Ness Monster Might Be Giant Eel
Scotland’s fabled Loch Ness Monster might most likely be a giant eel, a study of samples of DNA in the lake’s murky waters has found.Neil Gemmell, a geneticist from the University of Otago in New Zealand, led the study that tried to catalog all living species in the lake by extracting DNA from water samples.”Eels are very plentiful in the loch system — every single sampling site that we went to pretty much had eels and the sheer volume of it was a bit of a surprise,” Gemmell said.A tourist boat is seen on Loch Ness in Drumnadrochit, Scotland, Sept. 5, 2019.”We can’t exclude the possibility that there’s a giant eel in Loch Ness, but we don’t know whether these samples we’ve collected are from a giant beast or just an ordinary one — so there’s still this element of we just don’t know.'”The study did rule out the possibility that Nessie, the favorite of folklore, is a long-necked ancient reptile called a plesiosaur. The study also rejected speculations that it might be a Greenland shark or a giant sturgeon.The first written record of a monster relates to the Irish monk St. Columba, who is said to have banished a “water beast” to the depths of the River Ness in the 6th century.Thousands have tried to photograph or capture the elusive monster since. The most famous picture of Nessie, known as the 1934 “surgeon’s photo,” shows a head with a long neck emerging from the water. It was later revealed to be a hoax involving a toy submarine outfitted with a sea-serpent head.More recently, a high-tech marine drone found a monster in the Loch Ness in 2016 — but it turned out to be a Nessie-shaped beast created for the 1970 film “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” which sank nearly 50 years ago.”People love a mystery. We’ve used science to add another chapter to Loch Ness’ mystique,” Gemmell said.
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Memoir Coming in 2020
Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a book deal.St. Martin’s Press announced Thursday that her memoir will come out in Fall 2020. Sanders will write about her time in the Trump administration, “including the most dramatic and challenging moments,” and will also describe balancing an “all-consuming job” with raising a family.
The memoir is currently untitled.The book’s timing will likely add to speculation that Sanders is planning a run for governor in Arkansas. Her father, Mike Huckabee, served as the state’s governor from 1996-2007.
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Protest Body Art Gains Popularity in NYC
A peculiar form of body art is gaining popularity in New York city – It’s protest body art where people paint their bodies, not with pictures and innocent images, but slogans aimed at fighting divisiveness. Nina Vishneva has the story narrated by Anna Rice.
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Almodovar’s ‘Pain and Glory’ Picked to Bid for 2019 Oscar
Spain’s Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences says that Pedro Almodovar’s latest drama “Pain and Glory,” which was inspired by his own life story, will represent the country in the competition for this year’s Oscars.The film starring Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz will compete with other global entries for a nomination as Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. The Spanish Academy’s selection was announced Thursday.“Pain and Glory” received broad acclaim at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in France, where Banderas won the Best Actor award for his portrayal of a film director in his decline who flirts with drugs and has to confront his own past.In June, Almodovar won a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival.
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Social Media, Tech Companies Meet With US Intelligence on 2020 Election Strategy
A number of technology companies including Facebook Inc., Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft Corp. and Twitter Inc. met with representatives of the U.S. government Wednesday to discuss security strategies related to the 2020 U.S. election, Facebook said in a statement.The security teams of the companies met with representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security at Facebook’s headquarter in Menlo Park, California.“The purpose was to build on previous discussions and further strengthen strategic collaboration regarding the security of the 2020 U.S. state, federal, and presidential elections,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy said in a statement.
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Twitter Turns Off Tweeting by Text to Guard Against Hacking
Twitter on Wednesday halted users’ ability to fire off tweets via text messages as it seeks to fix a vulnerability that led to CEO Jack Dorsey’s account being hijacked.
Dorsey last week was the target of so-called “SIM swap” fraud, which enables a hacker to trick a mobile carrier into transferring a number — potentially causing people to lose control not only of social media, but bank accounts and other sensitive information.
This type of attack targets a weakness in the use of “two-factor authentication” via text message to validate access to an account, a break-in method that has grown popular in recent years.
“We’re temporarily turning off the ability to Tweet via SMS, or text message, to protect people’s accounts,” the Twitter support team wrote on the platform.
“We’re taking this step because of vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers and our reliance on having a linked phone number for two-factor authentication.”
The San Francisco-based service added that as it works on a long-term solution to the problem, tweeting via text message eventually will be turned back on in markets where users rely on that technique.Embarrassing hackEven with considerable security precautions in place, Dorsey became the victim of the embarrassing compromise when attackers hijacked his phone number and took control of his Twitter account.
Dorsey’s account was restored after a brief period during which the attackers posted a series of offensive tweets.
Some analysts say hackers have found ways to easily get enough information to convince a telecom carrier to transfer a number to a fraudster’s account, especially after hacks of large databases that result in personal data sold on the so-called “dark web.”
“Mobile accounts’ text messages can be hijacked by sophisticated hardware techniques, but also by so-called ‘social engineering’ — convincing a mobile provider to migrate your account to another, unauthorized phone,” said R. David Edelman, a former White House adviser who heads a cybersecurity research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“It only takes a few minutes of confusion to make mischief like Dorsey experienced.”
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Rapper Future to Give Scholarships, Tickets to Fans on Tour
The rapper Future has promised to give a $2,000 scholarship and pair of concert tickets to a fan at each stop on his Legendary Nights tour.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that eligible fans must be active area college students who follow Future’s FreeWishes Foundation on Instagram and submit an essay on how the scholarship would be a dream come true.'' The website says the Atlanta rapper and his family launched the nonprofit to deliver messages of hope bymaking dreams come alive.”
Future, whose real name is Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn, is touring 24 cities with Meek Mill and Megan Thee Stallion. The tour started in St. Louis, Missouri, and ends in Atlanta this month. Applications are due before the tour stops in each applicant’s city.
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Google’s YouTube Video Site Fined $170 Million
Google’s YouTube video service has been fined $170 million to settle charges of illegally collecting and sharing personal information from children.The Federal Trade Commission fined Google $136 million and the company will pay New York state $34 million to settle similar allegations.The settlement is the largest in a case involving a 1998 federal law that bans the collection of information about children under age 13 without parental consent.YouTube was accused of tracking viewers of children’s channels without parental consent and delivered millions of dollars in targeted advertisements to those viewers.”YouTube touted its popularity with children to prospective corporate clients,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said. “Yet when it came to complying with the law protecting children’s privacy, the company refused to acknowledge that portions of the platform were clearly directed to kids.”In addition to paying the fines, the settlement calls for YouTube to revise its process of handling children’s content.”We will treat data from anyone watching children’s content on YouTube as coming from a child, regardless of the age of the user,” said YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. “This means that we will limit data collection and use on videos made for kids only to what is needed to support the operation of the service. We will also stop serving personalized ads on this content entirely.”The settlement, which pales in comparison to the $5 billion fine the FTC imposed on Facebook earlier this year for privacy violations, was approved by a 3-2 vote, with two Democratic commissioners calling for harsher penalties.The agreement “repeats many of the same mistakes from the flawed Facebook settlement: no individual accountability, insufficient remedies to address the company’s financial incentives, and a fine that still allows the company to profit from its lawbreaking,” said Democratic Commissioner Rohit Chopra.Chopra also noted it was the third time since 2011 that the FTC sanctioned Google for privacy violations. The federal government has increasingly scrutinized large technology companies over the last two years, particularly with respect how they collect and use customers’ personal information.
Many of the companies are also under antitrust investigations to determine if they have illegally stifled competition.
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Oprah Winfrey Launching Wellness Arena Tour in Early 2020
Oprah Winfrey is taking her motivational spirit on the road early next year with an arena tour to promote a healthier lifestyle.The talk-show host and chief of OWN television network said Wednesday that she will launch the “Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus” tour starting Jan. 4 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She is working with Weight Watchers Reimagined to offer a full-day of wellness conversations during the nine-city tour.
It’s her first speaking tour in five years.
Winfrey says she wants to empower audiences to “support a stronger, healthier, abundant life.” She will be joined by high-profile guests. The names will be released at a later date.
Winfrey’s previous speaking tours include “Oprah’s Life Class” and “Oprah’s The Life You Want Weekend” in 2014.
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