In a Robot Future, Humans Are Still Stars, Technophiles Say
From lasers that cut denim at a factory, to drones that irrigate crops, it’s not a new story that machines are doing more work than ever. But people have long feared that robots are coming for their jobs, so technology evangelists now are calling on their peers to build a future in which the impact on human is lessened.
Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, a technology consulting company, thinks the solution is a “hybrid,” mixing humans and machines. He sees that happening already. O’Reilly says most software, for example, is actually a service that depends on human beings in the background to keep it updated and running.
This could be a paradigm shift for Silicon Valley acolytes. Out with the old: a reputedly cold, relentless push for efficiency through algorithms and automation, no matter the consequences for the working class. In with the new: innovation with a human face.
“It’s so important that we have to think about not using technology to replace people — but to augment them, to do something that was previously impossible,” O’Reilly said last week in Ho Chi Minh City at Apricot, an annual summit organized by the Asia and Pacific Internet Association and APNIC, the regional registry for domain names.
With more skills, people can work alongside robots. Lyft and Uber rely on software that’s intended to make drivers more productive. They’re not completely different from airplanes, which are flown mostly by computers, but there might never be a day when passengers feel comfortable flying without at least one human at the helm.
Jonathan Brewer, a trainer at the nonprofit Network Startup Resource Center, believes the next stage of development should improve on the one before it, when the exploding numbers of factories and machines left so many people with undrinkable water and unbreathable air. Now, he said, technophiles must consider how their inventions help people.
At an Apricot workshop, Brewer described sensors that alert residents an hour before a mudslide will hit, for example, and other “life-saving devices that cost very, very little money.”He says there doesn’t seem much point in having droids to clear tables and dig up copper ore if humans aren’t in a position to use the results of their labor.
O’Reilly illustrated the hybrid approach with the so-called Mechanical Turk. Not Amazon’s tool to outsource small tasks, but the 18th-century machine that seemed to beat humans at chess. In fact, there was a man inside all along, and that is the point. Looking out over an audience of programmers, engineers, and other operators building the internet, O’Reilly compared them to the Mechanical Turk: The world needs workers powered by blood, not just those powered by batteries.
“All of you, in some sense, are inside the internet. You go away, it stops working,” he said. “It’s not like a piece of software in a PC era where if you had a copy of Microsoft Windows running on your personal computer, it would keep running without the original programmers. Almost all of the software we depend on today is a service that depends on the work of people like you.”
There may be some wishful thinking, too, in technologists’ optimism that humans will thrive in the robot future. In 2015, consulting firm McKinsey projected that automation could eliminate 45 percent of today’s occupations. That’s why more people in the technology sector are warming to the idea of a universal basic income, which shares the benefits of innovation by giving each citizen a small monthly check.
But Brewer holds out hope in cooperation between people and machines. Many advancements don’t just make lives easier, such as thermostats that adjust the temperature to a dweller’s liking. He said there is technology, for example, that lets city employees know when street lights go out, or trash cans are full, so they don’t have to drive around checking manually, which many local governments do. But once the notice is sent, a human still needs to respond and ensure services are delivered.
For technology, conference-goers said, early adopters first embraced the inexorable, unsympathetic march of change as an indisputable benefit. But in this next phase, people are rethinking disruption, or at least wondering how to soften the blow on humans.
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Experimental Program Aims to Bridge Generation Gap
The generation gap is being bridged, one relationship at a time, through partnerships in an expiremental program between U.S. universities and retirement homes. Faith Lapidus explains.
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Turning Garbage Into Gas
It’s hard to teach young women about getting ahead through technology when they don’t even have enough light to study. That was the problem facing The Green Girls Project in Cameroon. So project leaders took a break from their lessons and focused on solving that problem. The result is enlightening. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Self-driving Bus With No Back-Up Driver Nears California
A pair of $250,000 autonomous buses began driving around an empty San Francisco Bay Area parking lot on Monday, preparing to move onto a local public road in California’s first pilot program for a self-driving vehicle without steering wheel or human operator.
California and other states are weighing the opportunities of becoming a hub of testing a technology that is seen as the future of transportation and the risks from giving up active control of a large, potentially dangerous vehicle.
In most tests of self-driving cars there is still a person seated at the steering wheel, ready to take over, although Alphabet Inc’s Waymo tested a car with no steering wheel or pedals in Austin, Texas, as early as 2015.
The bus project in San Ramon, at the Bishop Ranch office park complex, involves two 12-passenger shuttle buses from French private company EasyMile.
The project is backed by a combination of private companies and public transit and air quality authorities, with the intention of turning it into a permanent, expanded operation, said Habib Shamskhou, a program manager who strolled in front of a moving bus to show that the vehicle would notice him and react. It stopped.
In a test for reporters, one bus cruised a block-long circuit so consistently that it created a dirt track on the tarmac.
California legislators late last year passed a law to allow slow-speed testing of fully autonomous vehicles without steering wheels or pedals on public roads, with the Bishop Ranch test in mind.
The shuttle buses will test for a few months in the parking lots before operators apply for Department of Motor Vehicles approval under the new law. The vehicles are expected to swing onto the local street late this year or early in 2018.
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Report: Syrian Children Suffering from ‘Toxic Stress’ Due to War
Children in Syria are suffering from “toxic stress,” a severe form of psychological trauma that can cause life-long damage, according to a report released Thursday.
The report by the nonprofit Save the Children paints a horrifying picture of terrified children developing speech disorders and incontinence, and some even losing the capacity to speak. Others attempt self-harm and suicide.
Authors of the study, the largest of its kind to be undertaken during the conflict, warned that the nation’s mental health crisis had reached a tipping point, where “staggering levels” of trauma and distress among children could cause permanent and irreversible damage.
“We are failing children inside Syria, some of whom are being left to cope with harrowing experiences, from witnessing their parents killed in front of them to the horrors of life under siege, without proper support,” said Marcia Brophy, a mental health adviser for Save the Children in the Middle East.
Researchers spoke with 450 children, adolescents and adults in seven of Syria’s 14 governorates.
Adults said the main cause of psychological stress is the constant shelling and bombardment that characterize the war that is nearing its sixth anniversary.
Half the children the researchers talked to said they never or rarely feel safe at school and 40 percent said they don’t feel safe to play outside, even right outside their own home.
More than 70 percent of children interviewed experienced common symptoms of “toxic stress” or post-traumatic stress disorder, such as bedwetting, the study found. Loss of speech, aggression and substance abuse are also commonplace. About 48 percent of adults reported seeing children who have lost the ability to speak or who have developed speech impediments since the war began, according to the report.
More than half of the adults interviewed by Save the Children said they knew of children or adolescents who were recruited into armed groups.
The report called on the combatants to stop using explosives in populated areas, halt attacks on schools and hospitals, and stop recruiting children to fight.
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Zap Map: Satellite Tracks Lightning for Better Heads Up
A new U.S. satellite is mapping lightning flashes worldwide from above, which should provide better warning about dangerous strikes.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday released the first images from a satellite launched last November that had the first lightning detector in stationary orbit. It includes bright flashes from a storm that spawned tornadoes and hail in the Houston region on Valentine’s Day.
NOAA scientist Steve Goodman said ground radar sees lots of cloud-to-ground lightning, but this satellite provides more detailed views of lightning within clouds. Cloud flashes can later turn into ground strikes, hitting people like a bolt out of the blue. Scientists say this could add more warning time.
Earth gets about 45 lightning flashes a second, but 80 percent stay in clouds.
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Look Up to See Future of the Circus
For generations, the circus meant big entertainment – elephants, lion tamers, dancing bears, high-wire acts. But times, and tastes, have changed. In May, after nearly a century and a half, the Ringling Brothers/Barnum and Bailey Circus – “the greatest show on earth” – will close.
But circuses are alive and well, largely without the ringmasters and exotic animals. Instead, they use a combination of music, amazing acrobatics and story-telling to transfix their audiences.
“Circus artists have been producing new and incredible circus acts and apparatuses and shows that have an artistic context and theatrical storylines, or well-drawn characters,” Adam Woolley notes. “And this has been happening around the world for the past 10, 15 years or so.”
Woolley runs Circus Now, a non-profit organization which supports and promotes contemporary circus arts, which combine traditional circus skills, like acrobatics, juggling and trapeze, with theatrical techniques to tell a story.
Cutting-edge entertainment
Here in the U.S., smaller traditional troupes, like the Kelly Miller Circus, still pitch their tents across the country. But Woolley says there are more experimental companies that are pushing the art form, and those are the ones Circus Now works with.
“Audiences or families who might not be interested to go see, you know, some very avant garde modern dance, will still go see the circus. You know, people who would prefer to watch movies or television than go see a play, will probably still come see the circus.”
Circus Now’s festival in New York this month featured the Race Horse Company from Finland. Acrobat Rauli Kosonen formed it with a couple of other performers nine years ago, because he says there’s something unique about circus.
“I think it’s really pure art form, in the sense that you can really feel the risks – there’s a lot of risks, so you can get a lot of adrenaline, while you watch it, if there is kind of tricks that make your heart bounce. Because it’s real. They can see if they make a mistake, they might get hurt. So, I guess that’s always been why circus is appealing. It reminds us that, uh, we’re humans.”
And Kosonen – whose specialty is trampoline – has the broken bones to prove it.
“Well, I had three operations,” he admits, adding ruefully, “it’s part of the job; sometimes you don’t get lucky.”
New York’s Only Child Aerial Theatre also performed during the festival. Kendall Ridleigh, one of the troupe’s founders, says they shy away from calling themselves a circus.
“Just because there is the implication that the skills or the spectacle is sort of paramount, rather than the narrative. And we really have tried to keep the narrative the most important element and have the skills really drive and support the narrative.”
In a former factory in Brooklyn, Only Child is rehearsing its latest show, Asylum. It’s set in a mental institution in the 1970s. There’s a story, but there’s no spoken dialogue, says co-founder Nicki Miller.
“We would describe it as a theater piece that includes a lot of aerial work, dance, some recorded music, some live music and overhead projection and shadow. So, the story is told, rather than through dialogue, through the conversation of those theatrical vocabularies, instead,” Miller said.
So, even as the performers do aerial tricks, they’re dressed like mental patients, doctors and nurses, says Rileigh. There are no sparkles or spandex. But, they’re still doing stuff high off the ground…without a net.
A big tent for big stories
Circus Now’s Adam Woolley says contemporary circus companies, even with their different skill sets and artistic approaches, all fall under what can only be called the “big tent” of what circus can be.
He says they share the belief that with lots of practice and hard work, they can accomplish the impossible.
“That’s the core idea that everyone in circus believes in and everyone in circus tries to impart to the audiences – that ‘I have dedicated my life to this seven minutes of performance and honed my skill to the place where I’m going to accomplish something in front of you now that you did not think could be done.’”
And that’s what still thrills audiences.
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Iditarod Mushers Begin Nearly 1,000-mile Race Across Alaska
The world’s most famous sled dog race started Monday with 71 mushers setting off from the heart of Alaska and embarking on a nearly 1,000-mile trek across the wilderness.
The grandson of a co-founder of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race was the first competitor on the trail.
Ryan Redington, 33, of Wasilla led the other mushers out of the chute in Fairbanks nearly a half-century after his grandfather, Joe Redington Sr., helped stage the first race in 1973.
The contest has a staggered start so fans, including 2,600 schoolchildren, can cheer on the mushers, who leave every two minutes.
One race rookie, 53-year-old Roger Lee, threw his fist in the air as he took off from the chute.
Lee was born in California to British parents and grew up near Liverpool, England, listening to the Beatles and harder rock groups. He has seen AC/DC in concert 157 times in 16 countries, according to his race biography.
Lee spent 10 years with the British Army Air Corps before moving to America, where he serves with the Air Force. He took a one-year sabbatical to train for the Iditarod.
The fan-friendly ceremonial start of the race was held Saturday in Anchorage.
The competitive start is normally held a day later in Willow, about 50 miles north of Anchorage. But that start would have taken mushers over the Dalzell Gorge, where a lack of snow has left alders exposed on the trail and open water in places that normally would be frozen this time of year.
Winter conditions were not a concern in Fairbanks, where the temperature was minus 35 degrees Monday morning. The start was delayed a day to give mushers times to drive their dogs 360 miles north to the city of about 100,000 in interior Alaska.
Eighty-four mushers signed up for the race, and 13 scratched. The latest was Otto Balogh, a 40-year-old rookie from Budapest, Hungary, who cited health concerns when dropping out of the race two hours before it began.
Dallas Seavey, 30, has won four out of the last five races. He feels no pressure to get a record-tying fifth win, and is fully cognizant that winning streaks can only go for so long.
“And I’m truly OK with that, as long as I can look back on the race and know I ran my team to the best of their ability, and we all had a good run,” Seavey said.
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Work on Brain’s Reward System Wins Scientists One-million-euro Prize
Three neuroscientists won the world’s most valuable prize for brain research Monday for pioneering work on the brain’s reward pathways — a system that is central to human and animal survival, as well as disorders such as addiction and obesity.
Peter Dayan, Ray Dolan and Wolfram Schultz, who all work in Britain, said they were surprised and delighted to receive the Brain Prize, which they said was a recognition of their persistent curiosity about how the human brain works.
The scientists’ research, spanning almost 30 years, found that dopamine neurons are at the heart of the brain’s reward system, affecting behavior in everything from decision-making, risk-taking and gambling, to drug addiction and schizophrenia.
“This is the biological process that makes us want to buy a bigger car or house, or be promoted at work,” said Schultz, a German-born professor of neuroscience who now works at the University of Cambridge.
He said dopamine neurons are like “like little devils in our brain that drive us toward more rewards.”
Dayan, director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, added to Schultz’s findings with research showing how humans update and change their goals through a dopamine-driven system “reward prediction error.”
He showed that our future behavior is dictated by constant brain feedback on whether anticipated rewards are as expected, or better or worse than expected.
The one-million-euro Brain Prize, given by the Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark, is awarded annually and recognizes scientists for outstanding contribution to neuroscience.
Colin Blakemore, chairman of the selection committee, said the three scientists’ work had helped decipher the way people use and respond to rewards across many aspects of life.
“The implications of these discoveries are extremely wide-ranging, in fields as diverse as economics, social science, drug addiction and psychiatry,” he said in a statement.
Dolan, director of the new Max Planck Center for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing, and Dayan, cracked open a bottle of champagne in London after being told of the prize.
Schultz described the news as a fantastic reward.
“I can hear our dopamine neurons jumping up and down,” he said.
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A Bacterium Found in Soil Could Fight Tuberculosis
Scientists are developing an antibiotic from a microorganism found in soil to fight the tuberculosis bacterium. As TB becomes increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics, soil could hold the key to new drugs against this global killer.
Tuberculosis is treatable with antibiotics, but in thousands of cases, antibiotic misuse has caused the disease to become non-responsive to the drugs.
According to the World Health Organization, there are 10.4 million new cases of tuberculosis every year, killing 1.8 million people.
In 2015, it was estimated that 480,000 infections were not responsive to two major drugs commonly used to treat TB. A quarter-million patients died reportedly of drug-resistant infections.
An international team of researchers has been hunting for new sources of antibiotics in nature to treat deadly illnesses like TB.
Investigators have hit upon a species of bacteria in a large family called Streptomyces found in soil.
Making synthetic compounds
In the laboratory, they’ve extracted compounds from Streptomyces that target a specific enzyme called MraY in mycobacterium, the pathogen that causes TB. The compounds effectively kill mycobacterium.
Using synthetic chemistry, the researchers were able to recreate these compounds, turning them into more potent versions of the originals.
Structural biology professor David Roper of England’s University of Warwick is part of the team that includes scientists in the United States and Australia sleuthing for novel agents to treat disease.
In the case of the Streptomyces microorganism, Roper said researchers have extracted compounds that target how mycobacterium makes its cell walls. He likens them to bones in the human body.
“If you knock out our skeletons, you’re not going to be a very competent human being, are you? And the same is true for the biosynthesis of the bacterial cell wall. It’s exactly the same principle that penicillin inhibits, although that’s a different enzyme and other antibiotics like vancomycin for example. So, the biosynthesis of the bacterial cell wall is a good target for antibiotics,” said Roper.
Finding the right tools
The work was published in the journal Nature Communications.
In the soil, Roper said the bacteria use the compounds to kill other microorganisms near them, giving them a survival advantage.
“One of the reasons for looking at natural product compounds in general is that these things have been derived from nature, therefore they’ve gone through many millennia years of evolution in the first place, and they’ve been retained by nature so they must have, as it were, long-standing efficacy.”
The challenge has been growing soil bacteria like Streptomyces in the lab with available tools so they can be made into drugs. The team is looking for ways to do that and they are beginning to find the right tools.
There is no timetable for turning soil bacteria into drugs against diseases like TB, just that it will take time.
As new drugs from soil bacteria become available, Roper doesn’t rule out the possibility that TB eventually may become resistant to them too.
Researchers, however, have learned from experience with tuberculosis that antibiotics must be used with great care to preserve their effectiveness.
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‘La La Land,’ in Live Concert Form, Coming to Hollywood Bowl
Live from Los Angeles, it’s La La Land live!
Lionsgate announced Monday that “La La Land In Concert: A Live-to-Film Celebration” will come to the Hollywood Bowl on May 26-27. The live shows will be conducted by composer Justin Hurwitz, who won two Academy Awards last month for his work on the movie’s music.
The show will include a 100-piece symphony orchestra, choir and jazz ensemble, along with the film’s original vocal recordings from Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone and John Legend. The movie will play along while the musicians perform.
Hurwitz said in an interview with The Associated Press that before working on La La Land with director and writer Damien Chazelle, he told his longtime friend that the film would be perfect for the live stage.
“The process is just beginning,” Hurwitz said of prepping for the live dates. “We’re figuring out how to handle visually and musically the various music elements in the movie, and it’s a lot of fun brainstorming ideas and solutions. What is exciting is … to be able to really feature the musicians and show exactly what they’re doing.”
Tickets go on sale Friday. For the live shows, Hurwitz said they are using the same orchestra contractor from the movie.
Following the Memorial Day dates in Los Angeles, the live production will visit Atlanta; San Diego; San Antonio; Nashville, Tennessee; Washington, D.C.; and other U.S. cities. It will also travel internationally to the United Kingdom, Mexico, Italy, Turkey, Switzerland and Canada. Those dates, along with more cities, will be announced later.
La La Land won six Academy Awards, including best director for Chazelle and best actress for Stone. Hurwitz won best original score as well as best original song for “City of Stars,” shared with songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.
“There have been a couple times where I was in my apartment and I saw two Oscars sitting there [and] it almost took me a second to register what they were. The thought of those gorgeous, iconic statuettes sitting right there in my apartment is a bit surreal,” he said.
He also said it has been dreamlike to hear “people singing my songs back at me” because of the film’s success.
When asked if he could see La La Land on the Broadway stage, Hurwitz said: “Those conversations haven’t even started to be honest. … I think those conversations will happen inevitably, but I don’t know if an actual adaptation will happen. It’ll just be something we talk about and try to figure out, ‘should it be done, can it be done?”‘
Of the best picture flub during the Academy Awards — where La La Land was announced the winner before the Oscar was handed to the Moonlight creators, Hurwitz said: “I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about it much. But ‘Moonlight’ is an extraordinary movie and I am very happy for them.”
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Hoard of Coins Extracted From Sea Turtle
Thai veterinarians on Monday removed 915 coins from a 25-year-old sea turtle which had been swallowing items thrown into her pool for good luck, eventually limiting her ability to swim.
The coins and other objects removed from the turtle named Omsin — piggy bank in Thai — weighed 5 kg (11 lb). The turtle itself weighed 59 kg (130 lb).
The green sea turtle, living at a conservation center in Sriracha, Chonburi, east of the Thai capital of Bangkok, had been finding it hard to swim normally because of the weight.
The vets said they believed the seven-hour-long operation was the world’s first such surgery.
“We think it will take about a month to ensure she will fully recover,” said Nantarika Chansue, of Chulalongkorn University’s veterinary science faculty, adding that the turtle would need six more months of physical therapy.
There was no immediate estimate of the value of the coins, some of them foreign and many corroded.
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Heavy Social Media Use Could Lead to Isolation in Young Adults
Young adults who spend a lot of time looking for social connections on social media could instead find themselves feeling socially isolated, a new study suggests.
Researchers looked at the social media habits of 1,787 American adults aged 19 to 32, asking them how much they used 11 popular social media sites, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and LinkedIn, among others.
After controlling for various demographic factors, they found that people who used social media more than two hours per day “had twice the odds for perceived social isolation than their peers who spent less than half an hour on social media each day.”
Those who visited social media sites 58 times a week or more “had about triple the odds of perceived social isolation than those who visited fewer than nine times per week.”
Writing in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine add that increased social isolation has been associated with “an increased risk for mortality.”
“This is an important issue to study because mental health problems and social isolation are at epidemic levels among young adults,” said lead author Dr. Brian A. Primack, director of Pitt’s Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health. “We are inherently social creatures, but modern life tends to compartmentalize us instead of bringing us together. While it may seem that social media presents opportunities to fill that social void, I think this study suggests that it may not be the solution people were hoping for.”
“We do not yet know which came first, the social media use or the perceived social isolation,” said senior author Dr. Elizabeth Miller, professor of pediatrics at Pitt and chief of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC.
“It’s possible that young adults who initially felt socially isolated turned to social media. Or it could be that their increased use of social media somehow led to feeling isolated from the real world. It also could be a combination of both. But even if the social isolation came first, it did not seem to be alleviated by spending time online, even in purportedly social situations.”
Researchers social media may cause feelings of social isolation by replacing “authentic social experiences;” causing feelings of exclusion stemming from seeing photos of friends having fun at events to which they were not invited; or may lead people to think others have happier or more successful lives due to often idealized presentation of one’s life online.
Researchers say more study needs to be done, but they say doctors should ask patients about social media use if they show symptoms of social isolation.
“People interact with each other over social media in many different ways,” said Primack, “In a large population-based study such as this, we report overall tendencies that may or may not apply to each individual. I don’t doubt that some people using certain platforms in specific ways may find comfort and social connectedness via social media relationships. However, the results of this study simply remind us that, on the whole, use of social media tends to be associated with increased social isolation and not decreased social isolation.”
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Nature Plays Starring Role in Florida’s Everglades
Everglades National Park, in southern Florida, includes more than half a million hectares of wetlands. National parks traveler Mikah Meyer immersed himself in the River of Grass with treks through mud-filled swamps and close encounters with some of the park’s avian and reptilian residents, and talked with VOA’s Julie Taboh about his adventure.
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Adele Confirms Marriage to Partner Simon Konecki
Adele has officially announced she and longtime partner Simon Konecki are married, weeks after hinting at a wedding.
Adele casually dropped the news while chatting with the audience at her show in Brisbane, Australia, on Saturday. She was discussing her song, “Someone Like You,” which describes her feelings following a breakup. She told the crowd that she’s “addicted” to the “feeling when you first fall for someone.” She says she can’t have that feeling because she’s “married now.”
The announcement follows Adele’s thanking of her “husband” following her big win at last month’s Grammy awards.
Adele and Konecki have a 4-year-old son.
your ad hereWHO: Environmental Pollution Kills 1.7M Children Under Five Every Year
Environmental pollution kills more than 1 in 4 children under the age of five every year – that’s 1.7 million children worldwide.
The World Health Organization warns these child deaths will increase dramatically if action is not taken to reduce environmental risks.
WHO examines the impact of harmful environments on children’s health and offers solutions in two new studies, “Inheriting a Sustainable World: Atlas on Children’s Health and the Environment” and a companion report, “Don’t pollute my future! The impact of the environment on children’s health.”
The authors agree that air pollution is the biggest killer and is responsible for 6.5 million premature deaths every year, including nearly 600,000 deaths among children under age five.
Margaret Chan, WHO director-general, notes that young children are most at risk of dying from a polluted environment because of “their developing organs and immune systems, and smaller bodies and airways.”
While most of these child deaths occur in developing countries, Maria Neira, WHO Director, Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health told VOA that air pollution was a big leveler between rich and poor countries.
“You can be a very rich child, your parents very rich, but living in a place, in a city, which is very polluted-then there is very little you can do because we all need to breathe.
“So, even if you are rich or poor, you still need to breathe and this is very pernicious. Air pollution is everywhere,” she said.
WHO reports the most common causes of death among children aged one month to five years are diarrhea, malaria and pneumonia.
“These are very much affected by air pollution, water and sanitation, which is inadequate, but also the disease vectors, mosquitos around the house and the community,” said Annette Pruss-Ustun, scientist in WHO’s Public Health and Environmental Department.
“These are mainly a problem in low-and-middle-income countries except air pollution, which also children in high income countries are affected by,” she said. “But, there they do not die from it because the health care system takes care of them in time.”
WHO reports actions including those of providing safe water and sanitation, limiting exposure to hazardous chemicals, and improving waste management can prevent many environmentally induced deaths.
Maria Neira cited access to clean fuels as one of the most important interventions.
“Almost half of the world population is using dirty fuels for cooking, heating, and lighting at home. And, this is affecting very much mothers who are staying and cooking at home, but the children who are around mothers—they are exposed as well.”
Neira said that providing clean energy and clean fuels to households will have enormous benefits for the health of the children and others as well.
Besides these decades-old traditional threats, she warned that emerging environmental hazards, such as electronic or e-waste were posing great dangers for children.
”Most of our old computers and electronic material will end up in some place in the African continent where then you put a group of moms to remove certain pieces of that material, particularly heavy metals to recycle them for making some dollars,” she said. “The problem is that the mothers will go there with their own children.”
She added that exposing children to toxins can lead to reduced intelligence, attention deficits, lung damage and cancer.
Electronic and electrical waste is forecast to increase by 19% between 2014 and 2018, to 50 million metric tons by 2018.
WHO warns that temperature rise due to climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide will increase pollen in the atmosphere, resulting in higher rates of asthma in children
The health agency is calling for greater action to reduce indoor and outdoor air pollution, second-hand smoke, unsafe water, sanitation and inadequate hygiene.
WHO warns harmful exposures to environmental pollutants can start in the mother’s womb and can lead to “increased risk of chronic respiratory diseases, asthma, heart disease, stroke and cancer” later in life.
your ad hereHackers Drawn to Energy Sector’s Lack of Sensors, Controls
Oil and gas companies, including some of the most celebrated industry names in the Houston area, are facing increasingly sophisticated hackers seeking to steal trade secrets and disrupt operations, according to a newspaper investigation.
A stretch of the Gulf Coast near Houston features one of the largest concentrations of refineries, pipelines and chemical plants in the country, and cybersecurity experts say it’s an alluring target for espionage and other cyberattacks.
“There are actors that are scanning for these vulnerable systems and taking advantage of those weaknesses when they find them,” said Marty Edwards, director of U.S. Homeland Security’s Cyber Emergency Response Team for industrial systems.
Homeland Security, which is responsible for protecting the nation from cybercrime, received reports of some 350 incidents at energy companies from 2011 to 2015, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle has found. Over that period, the agency found nearly 900 security flaws within U.S. energy companies, more than any other industry.
Steps are being taken to thwart attacks. For instance, the Coast Guard in a joint operation with Houston police patrolled the waters southeast of Houston last year conducting sweeps for unprotected wireless signals that hackers could use to gain access to facilities. The operation was one of the first of its kind in the U.S. concentrating on cyberattacks by sea.
But the vast network of oil and gas operations makes it difficult to secure. Thousands of interconnected sensors and controls that run oil and gas facilities remain rife with weak spots.
Many companies the technology and personnel to detect hackers. Equipment was designed decades ago without security features, and efforts over the years to link computer networks to devices that monitor pressure or control valves have exposed operations to online threats.
“You could mess with a refinery or cause a vessel to explode,” Richard Garcia, a former FBI agent who became a cybersecurity specialist, told the Chronicle.
Power, chemical and nuclear facilities must adhere to strict cybersecurity measures, but federal law doesn’t impose such standards on the oil and gas sector. And when oil and gas companies have been infiltrated by a hacker, they’re not required to report the incident.
More than 20 of the nation’s largest oil companies _ including Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips, refiner Phillips 66 and pipeline operator Kinder Morgan _ declined to comment or did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The American Petroleum Institute, the national trade association for oil and gas, also declined to comment.
Charles McConnell, executive director of Rice University’s Energy and Environment Initiative, said oil companies tend to rush to deploy new computer technologies that make operations more productive, but only afterward considering ways to defuse online threats.
“The pace of change of the technology we’ve adopted is every step of the way more and more vulnerable to cyberattack,” McConnell said.
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Could Twitter’s New Abuse Crackdown Lead to Censorship?
Twitter introduced new safety measures this week meant to crack down on online harassment and protect people from viewing offensive material, but some free-speech advocates are concerned the changes could lead to censorship of unpopular ideas.
The social media company announced Wednesday that it would start hiding potentially menacing tweets, even if the tweets or accounts in question hadn’t been reported as abusive.
“We’re working to identify accounts as they’re engaging in abusive behavior, even if this behavior hasn’t been reported to us,” the company said in a statement announcing the changes. “Then, we’re taking action by limiting certain account functionality for a set amount of time, such as allowing only their followers to see their Tweets.”
The so-called stealth bans could be placed on accounts, the company’s statement said, if a Twitter user sent unsolicited messages to another user who was not following the sender.
Twitter said it would “act on accounts” only when it was confident abuse had taken place, based on the algorithms it uses to identify illicit posts.
This new automated stealth ban capability became a cause of consternation for Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the free-speech advocacy group PEN America, because she said it could easily become a solution “where there is really no problem that needs to be solved.”
‘Mistaken’ moves?
“To take action when there hasn’t been a complaint raises the concern of whether there will be mistaken blocking of accounts or suspending of accounts,” she said. “That raises a risk.”
Twitter has been under pressure to address abusive speech and trolling on its platform in recent months after celebrities and others complained of sustained, coordinated abuse campaigns.
Actress Leslie Jones notably swore off the social media service for a brief time last year after she was targeted by online trolls and harassed with racism and death threats. The incident led to a personal meeting between Jones and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and several months later the company began introducing new tools to address online abuse.
Twitter expanded its “mute” feature to allow users to block specific words or phrases from showing up in their notifications. It expanded users’ ability to report hateful conduct. And it retrained its support teams on dealing with online abuse.
These types of changes that allow users to have more control over what content they see and whom they interact with are positive steps, Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told VOA.
Control for users
The ACLU encourages companies to focus less on a top-down approach to censorship and more “on tools that allow users to control their experience on the platform,” she said.
“Attempts to put the thumb on the scale on the censorship side are prone to error and prone to human biases,” Bhandari said.
Newer tools introduced by Twitter, though, give the company a far greater role in controlling what content gets seen.
In February, Twitter began pre-emptively hiding what it called “potentially abusive or low-quality tweets” from conversations on the website. The tweets will still be visible to users, but only to “those who seek them out.”
“Our team has also been working on identifying and collapsing potentially abusive and low-quality replies so the most relevant conversations are brought forward,” Twitter said in a February statement.
VOA contacted Twitter multiple times for clarification on guidelines used to identify “low-quality” tweets but received no response.
Twitter also introduced a “safe search” feature in February that automatically removes tweets that contain “potentially sensitive content” from search results. A request for clarification on how this content is identified was not returned.
Being a non-government entity, Twitter has no real obligation to preserve free speech on its website. But Twitter has billed itself as a platform for free expression, and on the Twitter rules page, it says it believes in “speaking truth to power.”
Global town square
This is a role both PEN America and the ACLU take seriously. Both Nossel and Bhandari referred to the website as a sort of global town square, where everyone’s voice has equal weight.
“As a practical matter, decisions made by Twitter have a huge impact on the messages that we receive, and I hope that Twitter and other companies take those responsibilities seriously,” Bhandari said.
Nossel noted that Twitter has a financial incentive to be cautious on issues involving the balance between allowing free expression and stopping abuse.
“The power and influence of their platform depends on the free flow of ideas, so I think there are commercial reasons why they would not want to limit [free speech],” she said. “And I think for their users, they do have a kind of softer, implicit contract that they are going to be a platform in which you can express things freely.”
Bhandari said it’s important to find that balance, because if Twitter “allows a heckler’s veto to take over,” it will have a chilling effect on speech that’s similar to pre-emptively hiding content.
“One of the really important parts of that has to be transparency,” she said.
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Doctors Alarmed by Post-antibiotic Future
Unless new antibiotics are developed quickly, people will once again die from common infections. The World Health Organization has issued an urgent call for scientists to develop these new drugs, and for governments to fund the research.
Dr. Trish Perl, chief of infectious diseases at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said if there are no effective antibiotics, it will affect the entire practice of medicine.
“You all of a sudden understand what it was like to practice medicine maybe 50, 70, 80 years ago, when there weren’t antibiotics,” Perl said.
Without antibiotics, surgery will become much more dangerous. Doctors will be unable to treat diseases caused by E. coli, a bacterium that causes urinary tract infections and diarrhea. Even a virus such as the flu, which can lead to bacterial pneumonia, will mean these viruses will ultimately claim even more lives.
WATCH: Doctors Alarmed by Post-Antibiotic Future
New antibiotics needed
New antibiotics are urgently needed against bacteria that pose the greatest threat to human health. Those most at risk: residents of nursing homes, hospital patients, and children. Children may have weaker immune systems than adults, and they receive smaller doses of antibiotics than adults do.
“For the longest time we’ve had a number of different antibiotics in the pipeline at any given time, so whenever we ran out of the ability to use one, we would move to the next one,” Dr. Michael Bell, an expert in drug-resistant pathogens at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told VOA.
But that’s no longer possible. Joe Larsen, the director of biological, chemical and radiological and nuclear countermeasures at the Department of Health and Human Services, said his department drew up a list of pathogens several years ago that were becoming resistant to antibiotics.
Funding needs to change
“There are antibiotics in the pipeline, but the numbers are insufficient … to deal with the increasing rates of antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” he said.
Larsen’s department invests in pharmaceutical and bio-tech firms to make drugs, vaccines and diagnostics for public health emergency preparedness. Larsen is hopeful that a new antibiotic will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration later this year. He also said two to three more antibiotics are being developed that should be available in a year or two.
The WHO said it’s too expensive for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics on their own because they wouldn’t recoup their investment. Larsen agrees that the way antibiotics are commercialized needs to change.
Bacteria are constantly changing
One reason is that the more an antibiotic is used, the less effective it becomes. That’s because bacteria are constantly changing and finding new ways to resist the drugs that kill them. Once they find a way, they can pass on the gene so other bacteria can become drug-resistant as well.
To preserve the effectiveness of an antibiotic, Larsen said the profits from selling these drugs can’t be linked to the volume of sales the way the market normally works. He said the solution lies in public-private partnerships between governments and pharmaceutical or biotech firms.
In the meantime, antibiotic resistance is very real.
Lauri Hicks, who leads research on antibiotic use and resistance trends at the CDC, said, “We are seeing greater than 2 million episodes of antibiotic resistant infections each year in the U.S. alone. Twenty-three thousand of these episodes result in death.”
Don’t overuse antibiotics
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked hospitals and doctors to be careful not to overuse antibiotics. But beyond overuse, Bell, of the CDC, said there are other reasons these drugs are being rendered powerless.
“Antibiotic resistance is being generated by not only using too many antibiotics, but also by spread of infection by lack of hygiene, from unintended contact with soiled surfaces, so the infection-control side is equally important,” he said.
Patients can also help. On its website, the CDC says to take antibiotics as prescribed and finish the prescription, even if you feel better. Still, urgent action on a global level is needed to prevent the catastrophe that a post-antibiotic era would cause.
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Harvesting Power from Slow-Flowing Rivers
Scientists and engineers are constantly looking for more efficient ways to harvest energy from sustainable sources, such as the sun, wind, ocean waves and river flows. Researchers from Brown University have teamed up with a company from Rhode Island to build an innovative power generator suitable for slow-flowing rivers and tidal canals. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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At World Mobile Congress, Smart Tech Promises to Change Lives
We are in the midst of a mobile tech revolution that promises to change the way we live, say industry experts at this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, where the ‘Internet of Things’ and superfast 5G technologies are all the rage. But even the most basic mobile technology is changing lives in some of the world’s most remote parts.
The exhibit is a showcase of the latest technology — and a glimpse of what the future holds. And industry insiders at the MWC 2017 say there is a lot more to come.
Pibo, for example, is a mobile-connected robot designed to help families connect and express their emotions in the digital age. On the other hand, they could invest in a digital hang drum — a traditional instrument used in yoga, updated for the 21st century so it syncs with your smartphone.
U.S. technology giants AT&T and General Electric have come up with smart street lamps, with cameras, sensors and microphones connected to 4G mobile networks. Over three thousand are being installed in the western U.S. city of San Diego, California and will be used for traffic analysis.
But AT&T product manager Trey Winter, said the makers have bigger ambitions.
“You are going to be able to detect smart parking solutions, gunshot detections inside of a city infrastructure. Environmental features detecting weather, smog, pollution,” he said. “Really bringing to life the intelligence inside of the city.“
5G networks
Much of the buzz at this year’s show is around super-fast 5G networks — with faster download speeds and almost zero delay.
Roger Chen of CNET magazine explained that this means a “real-time connection.”
“The best example someone has given to me is a surgeon performing a surgery in one country with robotic hands in another country,” he added.
Apps offer solutions for Africa
Mobile technology is transforming the economies of many African countries, with smartphone apps ranging from herding cattle in Kenya and connecting dirty laundry to mobile washerwomen in Uganda.
Eneza, for one, uses basic mobile technology to offer access to a huge range of education. Two million students are signed up to its ‘virtual classroom‘ — and the better their grades, the more mobile airtime the parents receive.
The company’s chairman, Stephen Haggard said “they are able to access all the education they want for a subscription that’s about 10 U.S. cents per week.”
“That covers the full curriculum and will get them everything they need to do from around age eight to finishing school,” he said. “The reality in most of Africa is that mobile technology is actually the only way that you can reach huge numbers of people at low cost with any kind of content.”
A recent report by consultants McKinsey predicted that by 2025 half of sub-Saharan Africa’s billion strong population will have internet access, over two-thirds via smartphones.
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ePUMB skype chat
