A common complaint for busy, stressed out people is not being able to find the time and place to unwind. A new smartphone application promises to solve these problems by helping users practice an old Chinese form of healing meditation while on the go. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Americans gazed in wonder through telescopes, cameras and protective glasses Monday as the moon began blotting out the midday sun in the first full-blown solar eclipse to sweep the U.S. from coast to coast in nearly a century.
“The show has just begun, people! What a gorgeous day! Isn’t this great people?” Jim Todd, a director at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, told a crowd of thousands at an amphitheater in Salem, Oregon, as the moon seemed to take an ever-bigger bite out of the sun.
The celestial show was expected to be the most observed and photographed eclipse in history, with millions staking out prime viewing spots and settling into lawn chairs to watch, especially along the path of totality — the projected line of shadow created when the sun is completely obscured. The path was 60 to 70 miles (96 to 113 kilometers) wide, running from Oregon to South Carolina.
With 200 million people within a day’s drive from the path of totality, towns and parks braced for monumental crowds. Clear skies beckoned along most of the route, to the relief of those who feared cloud cover would spoil this once-in-a-lifetime moment.
Astronomers were giddy with excitement. A solar eclipse is considered one of the grandest of cosmic spectacles.
The Earth, moon and sun line up perfectly every one to three years, briefly turning day into night for a sliver of the planet. But these sights normally are in no man’s land, like the vast Pacific or Earth’s poles. This is the first eclipse of the social media era to pass through such a heavily populated area.
The moon hasn’t thrown this much shade at the U.S. since 1918. That was the country’s last coast-to-coast total eclipse. In fact, the U.S. mainland hasn’t seen a total solar eclipse since 1979 — and even then, only five states in the Northwest experienced total darkness.
Scientists said Monday’s total eclipse would cast a shadow that would race 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) through 14 states, entering near Lincoln City, Oregon, at 1:16 p.m. EDT, moving diagonally across the heartland over Casper, Wyoming, Carbondale, Illinois, and Nashville, Tennessee, and then exiting near Charleston, South Carolina, at 2:47 p.m. EDT.
Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois was in line to see the longest stretch of darkness: 2 minutes and 44 seconds.
All of North America was on track to get at least a partial eclipse, along with Central America and the top of South America.
In the southern Illinois village of Makanda, population 560 and home of the Eclipse Kitchen, lawn chairs were out and excitement was building.
“More and more people are coming in all the time,” said Debbie Dunn, designated car parker for the day.
Joe Roth, an amateur photographer, traveled south from the Chicago area to Alto Pass, Illinois, to catch his first total solar eclipse — on his 62nd birthday, no less. He said the stars aligned for him — “a Kodak moment for me to cherish and experience.”
Kim Kniseley drove overnight from Roanoke, Virginia, arriving in Madisonville, Tennessee, before dawn to get a parking spot at Kefauver Park, where by sunrise dozens of folks had claimed benches and set up tents.
He said he could have stayed home in Roanoke and seen a partial eclipse of 90 percent, but that would have been like “going to a rock concert and you’re standing in the parking lot.”
NASA and other scientists were in position to watch and analyze from telescopes on the ground and in orbit, the International Space Station, airplanes and scores of high-altitude balloons beaming back live video.
From aboard the space station, NASA astronaut Jack Fischer tweeted out a photo showing about a dozen cameras ready for action.
“All hands (cameras) on deck for #SolarEclipse2017 today,” he wrote, adding: “Don’t forget to protect your eyeballs!”
Hundreds of amateur astronomers converged on Casper, Wyoming. Among them was Mike O’Leary, whose camera was outfitted with a homemade eclipse filter, its focus and aperture settings locked in with blue painter’s tape. He was there to log his ninth eclipse.
“It’s like nothing else you will ever see or ever do,” O’Leary said. “It can be religious. It makes you feel insignificant, like you’re just a speck in the whole scheme of things.”
Citizen scientists also planned to monitor animal and plant behavior as daylight turned into twilight and the temperature dropped. Thousands of people streamed into the Nashville Zoo just to watch the animals’ reaction.
Scientists warned people not to look into the sun without protection, except when the sun is 100 percent covered. Otherwise, to avoid eye damage, keep the solar specs on or use pinhole projectors that can cast an image of the eclipse into a box.
The next total solar eclipse in the U.S. will be in 2024. The next coast-to-coast one will not be until 2045.
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Online abuse will be treated as seriously as offline offences, Britain’s prosecution service said on Monday in new guidance on handling hate crimes.
The rules – which included guidelines on helping disabled and bisexual victims – were meant to encourage more people to come forward and press courts to impose longer sentences, the Crown Prosecution Service said.
“This is a crime that’s under-reported. Sometimes people feel that they just have to put up with it … That’s absolutely not the case,” Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, told the BBC.
The new advice was in response to the growth of social media, the CPS said. There have been several high-profile instances of successful prosecutions of people who had abused lawmakers and other public figures online.
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“It’s still fresh in my mind, the scene of female genital mutilation,” said Purity Achieng, a 17-year-old from Kenya.
Achieng was speaking on stage in the finals of the Technovation Challenge World Pitch Summit, a competition that invites girls from around the world to come up with tech solutions to local community problems. Since it began in 2009, 15,000 girls from more than 100 countries have participated in the competition.
Achieng and her team of four other Kenyan teen girls call themselves “The Restorers.” They are taking on Female Genital Mutilation or FGM. They have created an app, called i-Cut, which connects girls at risk of FGM with rescue agents and offers support for those who have already been cut. It also provides information for anyone seeking to learn more about the practice.
“The pain of having your clitoris cut just because someone wants to have you go through a ‘rite of passage,’” said Achieng, during her pitch at the competition. “It’s painful and no one wants to listen to you. You cry and there you are, almost dying but nobody is caring about that.”
At least 200 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation or FGM in 30 countries, reports UNICEF.And 44 million are girls 14 and younger. The practice involves cutting out all or part of a woman’s clitoris, which is said to eliminate almost completely a woman’s sexual pleasure, in hopes of ensuring her virginity and keeping her faithful in marriage.
The Kenyan girls in this competition have not experienced FGM firsthand, as their tribe does not practice it, but they have friends who have. One of Achieng’s best friends was forced to drop out of school and into an early marriage at 15 after FGM, which greatly affected Achieng.
“I think for teenagers to be able to identify problems around them and provide a solution, that is really, really inspiring,” said Dorcas Owinoh, the team’s mentor, who works as a community manager at LakeHub, a technology innovation hub in Kisumu, Kenya. It was Owinoh who brought the idea of the Technovation Challenge to the team.
Achieng said it was her friend dropping out of school after FGM that inspired the team to create the app.
Other teams in the international event came from Armenia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Cambodia, the U.S. and other countries. The Restorers were the only team who qualified from the African continent.
“It’s always better when the people who face the problems, come up with their own solutions because they’re the most organic,” said Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO or Iridescent, the nonprofit behind Technovation.
Though the i-Cut app has the potential to save lives, it has not been embraced by all Kenyans.
“One village elder drove six hours to their school to protest the app because, according to him, that’s an African culture and the girls are being, according to him, Westernized,” Owinoh said.
The man had learned of the app after local media reported of the girl’s acceptance into Technovation. Owinoh said school leaders and teachers remained calm, spoke with him, and then asked him to leave.
Technovation comes at a time when women in tech are facing blowback, not just in Kenya, but even at the Google headquarters where the competition was held.A Google employee was recently fired after writing a memo positing that women are biologically inferior to men in regards to working in technology.
“I know the journey won’t always be easy but to the girls who dream of being an engineer or an entrepreneur and who dream of creating amazing things, I want you to know that there’s a place for you in this industry, there’s a place for you at Google—don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the girls.
The Restorers did not win the Technovation Challenge, but they will continue their fight against FGM and hope to get i-Cut into the Google Play Store soon.
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At least 200 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation in 30 countries. And according to UNICEF, 44 million are girls 14 years old and younger. One group of Kenyan teens is standing up to this archaic so called “right of passage” and offering would be victims a possibly life saving alternative — with an app. Deana Mitchell reports from Silicon Valley.
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How does a former stay-at-home mom become an employee of a tech company that could be worth more than $1 billion?
For Ellein Cheng, mom to a 5½- and a 2½-year-old, the answer involved a “returnship.”
So-called returnships are internships that target men and women who have been out of the workforce, either for childrearing or other caregiving. It gives them a chance to retrain in a new field.
In Cheng’s case, the former math teacher and tutor took a returnship at AppNexus, an online advertising company.
For companies, returnships are an opportunity to tap into more mature and professionally diverse talent pools. For participants who may be out of the workforce, it’s a chance to refresh their networks, learn new skills and try on new roles.
Beneficial arrangement
For both parties, it’s a low-risk, low-commitment arrangement. Companies can achieve their goals to make the employee ranks more diverse. Job seekers can potentially find full-time work.
Cheng’s returnship was set up by Path Forward [[www.pathforward.org/]], a New York-based nonprofit that works with tech companies to coordinate 16-week, paid assignments for those who have been away from the labor market for two or more years because of caregiving.
The organization partners with tech companies that range in size from 30-person startups to behemoths such as PayPal, which has more than 10,000 employees.
“What these companies of every size in the tech sector have in common is rapid growth, and also not enough talent to fulfill their needs,” said Tami Forman, executive director at Path Forward.
Women re-entering the workforce often struggle to explain the gap in their resume and find employment harder to come by, Forman said.
“They often get feedback from companies and recruiters and hiring managers that makes them believe that they’ll never be hired, that no one will ever overlook their gap,” she said. The organization says it gets results — 40 out of the 50 women who have gone through the program were offered ongoing employment at the companies in which they interned.
Teaching background
In her job search, Cheng applied for teaching positions but was also open to other fields. The product support work struck a chord with her in its appeal for candidates “passionate about learning and teaching.”
The program gave both managers and participants the chance to see if a long-term opportunity would be the right fit for them.
It also provided a dose of inspiration.
Other employees were “inspired to see people stepping out of their comfort zone, taking a big risk, working on something they haven’t done before,” Lorraine Buhannic, senior director of talent acquisition at AppNexus, said.
For Cheng, the inspiration came from a more personal place — her daughters.
They are growing up “in a world that is changing so quickly with technology, and I just want to be part of that,” she said. “I want to grow with them, I want to learn with them.”
In the end, the match worked. After the returnship, AppNexus hired Cheng as a product support specialist.
Now working in the fast-paced world of online advertising, Cheng says she doesn’t feel she has left her old self behind.
“I’m still obviously learning a lot, because I’m switching careers completely, but at the same time, still bringing the teaching element part of it every day to work,” she said.
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The lack of women and diversity in the tech industry remains a headline issue, but so-called “returnship” programs are giving companies the chance to tap into a new talent pool — former stay-at-home moms and dads. How do their skills translate in the tech world? VOA’s Tina Trinh explains.
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An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.S do not have a limb, according to Rice University in Houston. While existing prosthetics allow amputees to regain some of their abilities, there are very few devices that provide sensory feedback for the users. Researchers from Rice University, the University of Pisa and the Italian Institute of Technology are working to allow amputees to better perceive what their prosthesis is doing. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Houston.
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A group of Cambodian girls who recently traveled to California to compete in a mobile app competition offered inspiration for other girls worldwide to consider careers in technology.
Their pitch in Silicon Valley wasn’t a bid to be the next billion-dollar company. Instead, they want to help their country with a mobile phone application to address poverty.
“Let’s fight poverty by using our app. Don’t find customers for your product, find products for your customers,” said Lorn Dara Soucheng, 12, who led the team that created the app, Cambodian Identity Product.
“We want to increase employment for Cambodians, so there will be a reduction of Cambodian migrants to work at other countries, reducing poverty through making income and providing charity to local Cambodians,” Chea Sopheata, 11, told the judges at Google’s headquarters. Google was one of the program’s sponsors.
To participate in the Aug. 7-11 Technovation global competition, girls around the world had to build a mobile app — and a business plan — that addressed a U.N. development goal. The Cambodian girls picked poverty.
While globalization has boosted Cambodia’s economic growth, especially its tourism industry, it has also created greater economic inequality and competition. The girls think their app can help.
“We want to promote our culture to people from all over the world,” said Lorn Dara Soucheng.
At their young age, no one expects these girls to be able to solve their country’s most pressing issues quite yet. But their presence here highlighted another issue: girls in tech fields.
In the U.S. and worldwide, the number of women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) remains low or even has dropped.
In Cambodia, just 14 percent of students in information technology were women as of 2010. It’s a situation some attribute to a lack of equal access to education and a lack of female role models.
It’s hoped that programs like Technovation can reverse that trend.
“For the first time in history, technology can really help girls have a strong voice and help us have a society that has equality,” said Tara Chklovski, founder and CEO of Iridescent, the nonprofit organization behind Technovation.
These young Cambodian girls have proved how far they can go with technology. Most come from underprivileged backgrounds but had support from teachers, mentors and family.
Cambodian American Pauline Seng, a program manager at Google, said the young coders have become role models for many other Cambodians, including herself. She didn’t get into technology until she was 23.
“There’s going to be so many people who aspire to reach this stage and also inspire other people to get involved in technology,” she said.
Although the Cambodian girls did not win the grand prize, which went to a team from Hong Kong, they were proud to have made it to Google and Silicon Valley.
After watching the male CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, speak at the closing ceremony, the girls said they believed the tech giant would one day have a female leader.
“Yes!” they said, in unison.
Whether that will come true or not, they have themselves already become the youngest role models to inspire others, one girl at a time.
Deana Mitchell contributed to this report, which originated on VOA Khmer.
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A group of young Cambodian girls recently took part in a mobile app competition for girl coders in California. Traveling from their home country to participate in the global competition, their story offers inspiration for other girls around the world to consider a career in tech. VOA’s Sophat Soeung reports from Silicon Valley.
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They are being booted off or locked out of their websites. Some can no longer blog. Their electronic payment systems are being canceled. Even their music can’t be heard.
For some white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, operating online has become much harder in the wake of last week’s “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in violent clashes between extremist groups and counterprotesters.
On Thursday, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi and white supremacist news site and one of the organizers of last weekend’s demonstrations, was ejected from a Russian internet domain provider that was hosting its site.
The French news agency AFP quoted a statement from Alexander Zharov, the head of Russia’s telecommunications watchdog Roskomnador, calling on the domain provider to stop hosting Daily Stormer.
The Daily Stormer had recently turned to the Russian firm after being knocked offline by its U.S. providers, first GoDaddy, then Google.
As of Thursday night, the Daily Stormer was not online.
Resisting the role of censor
While tech firms have been under government pressure to crack down on state-sponsored terrorist groups, they have mostly resisted efforts to play the censor when it comes to who uses their services. Their terms of use guidelines often outline restrictions, but they have traditionally declined to police offensive content.
That laissez-faire approach appeared to be changing after last weekend’s demonstrations prompted by the rally’s violence and the recognition that extremist groups rely on a host of digital services to organize.
But the shift comes with great ambivalence.
Potentially dangerous moves
CloudFlare, which makes websites secure and fast, decided to stop serving the Daily Stormer. But it wasn’t an easy decision, wrote Matthew Prince, the firm’s chief executive.
“Someone on our team asked after I announced we were going to terminate the Daily Stormer: ‘Is this the day the internet dies?’”
On Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that advocates for civil liberties in the digital world and one that has stood with tech companies in its battles with the U.S. government on surveillance, criticized the tech companies’ actions.
“We strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google and Cloudflare did here was dangerous,” the organization wrote in a statement on its blog.
Tech companies, with few competitors, increasingly have more power to control online speech, EFF wrote, and “the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world.”
“Every time a company throws a vile neo-Nazi site off the Net, thousands of less visible decisions are made by companies with little oversight or transparency,” EFF added.
Cutting off financial services
While Google, GoDaddy and Cloudflare refused to host the Daily Stormer site, other extremist groups and supporters were affected in other ways, such as where they could stay, how they exchanged money and the music they listened to.
Ahead of the protests, Airbnb banned users from staying in Charlottesville if it appeared they were coming for the protests.
PayPal said it does not allow groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi groups engaged in “activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance” to use its service for processing payments. Apple Pay also pulled its services for groups selling far-right merchandise.
Spotify removed “hate bands” from its service.
WordPress, the blogging platform, cut off access to its site for Vanguard America, a group associated with James Fields, who allegedly drove his vehicle into a crowd of counterprotesters. He is charged with second-degree murder in the death of one woman and injuring nearly two dozen other people.
GoFundMe, a crowdfunding site, took down campaigns for assisting in Fields’ legal defense.
Prince, of CloudFlare, wrote that making the decision to boot the Daily Stormer could change how the firm handles other takedown requests.
“Make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don’t like,” he said.
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A U.S. researcher says she has developed automated ways to identify links between online sex trafficking ads and the digital currency Bitcoin, techniques that may help locate children being sold for sex.
Law enforcement and anti-trafficking groups could use the methods to investigate Backpage.com, an online classified advertising site where sex ads can be found, according to a statement by the University of California Berkeley, where the research was based.
About 1.5 million people in the United States are victims of trafficking, mostly for sexual exploitation, according to anti-trafficking groups.
Most sex trafficking victims are children, and most are advertised or sold online, according to a U.S. Senate subcommittee report released this year.
Algorithms do the digging
The new research uses an algorithm that analyzes writing styles to identify authors and could be applied to online trafficking ads, Rebecca Portnoff, its lead author, said Thursday.
A second algorithm can use time stamps to trace ad payments to accounts, known as wallets, at Bitcoin, a web-based digital currency that allows money to move quickly and anonymously.
Comparing time stamps of ad purchases on Bitcoin and time stamps and information on Backpage ads could help identify who is paying for them, said Portnoff, a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate in computer science who developed the techniques as part of her dissertation.
“Where previously you might have five different phone numbers that you had no idea were connected, when you can see that they all came from the same wallets, that the same person paid for them, that’s a concrete sign that these five phone numbers are all related to each other,” she said.
“I knew this was an issue that law enforcement was especially interested in,” she added.
Boost for law enforcement
Having automated style and time stamp analyses to identify sex ads by authors and Bitcoin owners is significant, said Damon McCoy, a New York University Tandon School of Engineering assistant professor of computer science and engineering and a co-author of the research.
“Any technique that can surface commonalities between ads and potentially shed light on the owners is a big boost for those working to curb exploitation,” McCoy said in a statement.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has said more than 70 percent of the reports it gets of trafficked children involve Backpage, based in Dallas, Texas.
Backpage did not respond to a request for comment.
The findings will be published by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, UC Berkeley said.
It said the work was funded by the Amazon Web Services Cloud Credits for Research Program, the technology and security firm Giant Oak, Google, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.
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From the sky over occupied Europe to an elephants stable in India and to its final resting place in an air museum in England, this was the 100-year journey for one of the world’s first strategic bombers. And the last part was the most astonishing because the planes’ remains, found in India, were almost beyond recognition. VOA’s George Putic has the story.
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Silicon Valley joined a swelling backlash against neo-Nazi groups in the United States on Wednesday as more technology companies removed white supremacists from their services in response to weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Social media networks Twitter and LinkedIn, music service Spotify and security firm CloudFlare were among the companies cutting off services to hate groups or removing material that they said spread hate.
Earlier in the week, Facebook, Alphabet and GoDaddy also took steps to block hate groups.
The wave of internet crackdowns against white nationalists and neo-Nazis reflected a rapidly changing mindset among Silicon Valley firms on how far they are willing to go to police hate speech.
Tech companies have taken down violent propaganda from Islamic State and other militant groups, in part in response to government pressure. But most internet companies have traditionally tried to steer clear of making judgments about content except in cases of illegal activity.
CloudFlare, which protects some 6 million websites from denial-of-service attacks and hacking, on Wednesday afternoon dropped coverage of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.
“I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet,” CloudFlare founder and Chief Executive Matthew Prince said in an email to employees.
CloudFlare is well-known for defending even the most distasteful websites, and services like it are essential to the functioning of websites.
Daily Stormer helped organize the weekend rally in Charlottesville where a 32-year-old woman was killed and 19 people were injured when a man plowed a car into a crowd protesting the white nationalist gathering.
Daily Stormer has been accessible only intermittently the past few days after domain providers GoDaddy and Google Domains, a unit of Alphabet, said they would not serve the website.
By Wednesday, Daily Stormer had moved to a Russia-based internet domain, with an address ending in .ru. Later in the day, though, the site was no longer accessible at that address.
Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin said on a social network used by many of his supporters, Gab, that his site would be back soon.
“The CloudFlare betrayal adds another layer of super complexity. But we got this,” he said. He could not immediately be reached for further comment.
Prince, the CloudFlare chief executive, said in an interview that despite his decision he was conflicted, because it could become harder to resist pressure from governments to censor.
“You don’t have to play this game too many moves out to see how risky this is going to be,” Prince said. “‘What about this site? What about this site?'”
Only the biggest companies will be able to navigate the varying laws in different countries, he added. “We’ve lost a lot of the fight for a free and open internet.”
Twitter on Wednesday suspended accounts linked to Daily Stormer. The company said it would not discuss individual accounts, but at least three affiliated with the Daily Stormer led to pages saying “account suspended.”
The social network prohibits violent threats, harassment and hateful conduct and “will take action on accounts violating those policies,” the company said in a statement.
Larger rival Facebook, which unlike Twitter explicitly prohibits hate speech, has taken down several pages from Facebook and Instagram in recent days that it said were associated with hate speech or hate organizations. It also took down the event page that was used to promote and organize the “Unite the Right” rally.
“With the potential for more rallies, we’re watching the situation closely and will take down threats of physical harm,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday.
Facebook also said it had removed accounts belonging to Chris Cantwell, a web commentator who has described himself as a white nationalist and said on his site that he had attended the Charlottesville rally. Cantwell’s YouTube account also appeared to have been terminated.
Cantwell could not immediately be reached for comment.
LinkedIn, a unit of Microsoft, suspended a page devoted to Daily Stormer and another page belonging to a man associated with the site, Andrew Auernheimer. LinkedIn declined to comment. Reddit this week eliminated one of its discussion communities that supported the Unite the Right rally, saying that the company would ban users who incite violence.
Spotify, based in Sweden, said it was in the process of removing musical acts from its streaming service that had been flagged as racist “hate bands” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality or the like is not tolerated by us,” the company said in a statement, adding that record companies should also be held responsible.
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Thousands upon thousands of cans are filled with beer, capped and washed, wrapped into six-packs, and boxed at dizzying speeds — 1,500 a minute, to be exact — on humming conveyor belts that zip and wind in a sprawling factory near Tokyo.
Nary a soul is in sight in this picture-perfect image of Japanese automation.
The machines do all the heavy lifting at this plant run by Asahi Breweries, Japan’s top brewer. The human job is to make sure the machines do the work right, and to check on the quality the sensors are monitoring.
“Basically, nothing goes wrong. The lines are up and running 96 percent,” said Shinichi Uno, a manager at the plant. “Although machines make things, human beings oversee the machines.”
The debate over machines snatching jobs from people is muted in Japan, where birth rates have been sinking for decades, raising fears of a labor shortage. It would be hard to find a culture that celebrates robots more, evident in the popularity of companion robots for consumers, sold by the internet company SoftBank and Toyota Motor Corp, among others.
Japan, which forged a big push toward robotics starting in the 1990s, leads the world in robots per 10,000 workers in the automobile sector — 1,562, compared with 1,091 in the U.S. and 1,133 in Germany, according to a White House report submitted to Congress last year. Japan was also ahead in sectors outside automobiles at 219 robots per 10,000 workers, compared with 76 for the U.S. and 147 for Germany.
‘Lifetime employment’
One factor in Japan’s different take on automation is the “lifetime employment” system. Major Japanese companies generally retain workers, even if their abilities become outdated, and retrain them for other tasks, said Koichi Iwamoto, a senior fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry.
That system is starting to fray as Japan globalizes, but it’s still largely in use, Iwamoto said.
Although data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show digitalization reduces demand for mid-level routine tasks — such as running assembly lines — while boosting demand for low- and high-skilled jobs, that trend has been less pronounced in Japan than in the U.S.
The OECD data, which studied shifts from 2002 to 2014, showed employment trends remained almost unchanged for Japan.
That means companies in Japan weren’t resorting as aggressively as those in the U.S. to robots to replace humans. Clerical workers, for instance, were keeping their jobs, although their jobs could be done better, in theory, by computers.
That kind of resistance to adopting digital technology for services also is reflected in how Japanese society has so far opted to keep taxis instead of shifting to online ride hailing and shuttle services.
‘Human harmony with machines’
Still, automation has progressed in Japan to the extent the nation has now entered what Iwamoto called a “reflective stage,” in which “human harmony with machines” is being pursued, he said.
“Some tasks may be better performed by people, after all,” said Iwamoto.
Kiyoshi Sakai, who has worked at Asahi for 29 years, recalls how, in the past, can caps had to be placed into machines by hand, a repetitive task that was hard not just on the body, but also the mind.
And so he is grateful for automation’s helping hand. Machines at the plant have become more than 50 percent smaller over the years. They are faster and more precise than three decades ago.
Gone are the days things used to go wrong all the time and human intervention was needed to get machines running properly again. Every 10 to 15 minutes, people used to have to go check on the products; there were no sensors back then.
Glitches are so few these days there is barely any reason to work up a sweat, he added with a smile.
Like many workers in Japan, Sakai doesn’t seem worried about his job disappearing. As the need for plant workers nose-dived with the advance of automation, he was promoted to the general affairs section, a common administrative department at Japanese companies.
“I remember the work being so hard. But when I think back, and it was all about delivering great beer to everyone, it makes me so proud,” said Sakai, who drinks beer every day.
“I have no regrets. This is a stable job.”
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Ireland’s finance minister rejected the European Commission’s demand that it retroactively collect 13 billion euros in taxes from Apple, saying this was not Dublin’s job in an interview with Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) newspaper.
In the interview, extracts from which the FAZ published on Wednesday, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said the tax rules from which Apple benefited had been available to all and not tailored for the U.S. technology giant. They did not violate European or Irish law, he added.
“We are not the global tax collector for everybody else,” the paper quoted him as saying. The European Commission last year ruled that Apple paid so little tax on its Ireland-based operations that it amounted to state aid.
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Canadian financial regulators have approved the public sale of a new digital currency in the country’s first official endorsement of money created independently of the government or central banks, company officials said on Wednesday.
Produced with digital encryption techniques, cryptocurrencies like Montreal-based impak Coin allow users to create their own money supply – with potentially significant impacts for how wealth and property rights are controlled.
Impak Coin has already raised more than C$1.5 million ($1.18 million) for the new currency and plans to launch an Initial Coin Offering – or a public sale of the digital money – this month.
By allowing people to create a new currency, the project aims to reduce the power of big banks in determining how property rights are managed and money is created, said Paul Allard, chief executive of impak Finance, the social enterprise behind the project.
“It is up to communities to decide how to manage a currency, it is not only for the government to decide,” Allard told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
‘No need for government’
Throughout modern history governments have had control over how money is created and the power to enforce contracts and determine how goods and services are transferred.
Cryptocurrencies – through blockchain, the information storage and database system they use – have challenged that power, said Simon Trimborn, a professor at the Free University of Berlin who studies digital networks.
“The link between cryptocurrencies and individual property rights is the information storage and transaction system behind cryptocurrencies, the blockchain,” Trimborn told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“It is a database which can guarantee property rights while there is no need for relying on a company or government.”
Contracts are made digitally between peers and transactions are often conducted without government oversight, reducing the state’s power over the market.
The move by financial authorities to approve the sale of the digital money means “confidence and trust for investors”, said Jean-Philippe Vergne, a professor at the Ivey Business School in Ontario, Canada, who studies cryptocurrencies.
“We are observing a profound change in the nature of capitalism,” Vergne told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “For the first time we have a technology that allows us to remove intermediaries such as government or central banks.”
Digital impact
Impak Finance hopes to raise up to C$10 million from its first sale of coins. Users who buy the new currency will be able to spend it via a mobile wallet connected to their phones.
More than 500 businesses have signed up to accept the new currency when it launches, Allard said.
He expects that will grow into the thousands as the project develops a “critical mass” of users, leading to more buyers and sellers making transactions.
Users will be able to exchange impak coins for traditional money which will be credited to their accounts after an initial waiting period in order to stop speculators from causing volatility in the currency’s value, Allard said.
Impak Finance will initially keep 40 percent of the money invested in the new currency as reserves in order to have cash on hand if users want to exchange it for traditional money.
Only businesses adhering to social and environmental standards are able to use the currency, said Allard, who hopes consumers interested in ethical purchasing will be attracted to the plan.
The “impact economy” – a small but growing sector that seeks to put the achievement of social good at the center of business – is expected to grow by more than 15 percent next year in North America, Allard said.
New type of property
Impak Finance will be entering a crowded market of new digital currencies, analysts said.
Following the growth of bitcoin, the most well known cryptocurrency, there are now more than 1,000 similar digital currencies being traded over the internet, said Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University in the United States.
Most of these new digital offerings, however, are used for speculation – investors hoping the currency will gain popularity and then rise in value – rather than buying and selling tangible goods and services, Narayanan said.
“People are trying to get the state out of money and various forms of property,” Narayanan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “regulators and law enforcement are trying to adapt to a new technological development.”
($1 = 1.2707 Canadian dollars)
Technology companies, such as Microsoft and Cisco Systems, have ramped up lobbying ahead of talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, looking to avoid any future restrictions on cloud storage and to promote an international pact to eliminate technology goods tariffs.
U.S., Mexican and Canadian negotiators are due to start talks on the 23-year-old trade pact on Wednesday. Farming and transportation groups have traditionally dominated lobbying on NAFTA, but technology lobbyists are helping lead the recent surge in efforts to influence Washington, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Tech companies and trade organizations disclosed they had 48 arrangements with lobby groups that discussed NAFTA with administration officials or lawmakers in the second quarter, up from 17 groups in the first quarter and one group at the end of 2016, according to the data.
“It’s both defensive and offensive,” Devi Keller, director of global policy for the Semiconductor Industry Association, said of the industry’s position on the new talks. “There is an opportunity for expansion.”
The industry now has almost as many lobby groups representing its views on NAFTA as the transport sector, which includes automakers. That sector had 52 lobbying groups discussing the trade pact with government officials between April and June. Agriculture still dominates the NAFTA lobbying effort with 86 arrangements with lobbying groups.
While the auto and farm lobbies are seeking to preserve cross-border supply chains and to retain access to markets in Mexico and Canada, the tech sector wants a revamped NAFTA to help it grow future business.
President Donald Trump has blamed NAFTA for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs and threatened to withdraw from the pact unless it can be reworked in the United States’ favor.
Tech firms want a ban on any future government requirements that providers of services, such as cloud computing, store data in a particular country. They also seek a commitment by NAFTA members to join a broader international pact to eliminate all tariffs on a broad range of information technology goods, including computers, smartphones, semiconductors and medical devices.
Today, the United States and Canada already subscribe to the broader tech agreement but Mexico does not.
Template for future trade
While tech goods already face no tariffs under NAFTA and industry representatives said there are no data flow restrictions in the region hampering trade, U.S. firms want an updated NAFTA to help them access other markets by serving as a tech template for future trade pacts.
Tech industry associations have sent letters to the Trump administration asking negotiators to prioritize free flows of data and low tariffs as well as global cybersecurity standards, and have met with staff at the U.S. Trade Representative.
“We’re fairly confident the issues we identified will be addressed in the negotiations,” said Ed Brzytwa, director of global policy at the Information Technology Industry Council.
It remains unclear, however, how prominently tech concerns will feature at NAFTA talks given Trump’s focus on manufacturing.
The CRP, a nonprofit group that advocates for government transparency, includes media and publishing firms in the technology sector, but the overwhelming majority of the sector’s disclosures on NAFTA came from hardware, software and digital services firms.
The CRP’s database incorporates disclosures to both the Senate and the House of Representatives and includes both in-house lobbyists and external lobbying firms.
Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon
Cisco Systems, a networking hardware company, had as many as 10 lobbyists working on NAFTA issues. On a lobby disclosure form reviewed by Reuters, Cisco Systems listed NAFTA and government procurement as the trade issues handled by its lobbyists.
Microsoft, which counts cloud computing and software as core businesses, had as many as 13 lobbyists working on NAFTA, according to the CRP database.
The disclosure forms filed by Microsoft do not make clear whether all 13 lobbied on NAFTA, which is listed along with several other trade-related issues and cloud computing.
Amazon, a major cloud services provider and internet retailer, also cited NAFTA as well as “customs procedures” in its lobbying disclosure. The Trump administration has proposed easing customs barriers for online purchases.
Cisco Systems and Amazon declined to comment for this story, while Microsoft representatives did not respond to a request for comment.
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Drones, small flying machines with cameras mounted on them, have become easily accessible to consumers. Scientists, police and businesses have found often lifesaving uses for drones, but these relatively low-cost machines can also be weaponized. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from a recent Chemical Sector Security Summit in Houston on the light and dark side of drone technology.
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The internet domain registration of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer was revoked twice in less than 24 hours in the wake of the weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, part of a broad move by the tech industry in recent months to take a stronger hand in policing online hate speech and incitements to violence.
GoDaddy, which manages internet names and registrations, disclosed late Sunday via Twitter that it had given Daily Stormer 24 hours to move its domain to another provider, saying it had violated GoDaddy’s terms of service.
The white supremacist website helped organize the weekend rally in Charlottesville where a 32-year-old woman was killed and 19 people were injured when a man plowed a car into a crowd protesting the white nationalist rally.
After GoDaddy revoked Daily Stormer’s registration, the website turned to Alphabet’s Google Domains. The Daily Stormer domain was registered with Google shortly before 8 a.m. Monday PDT (1500 GMT) and the company announced plans to revoke it at 10:56 a.m., according to a person familiar with the revocation.
As of late Monday the site was still running on a Google-registered domain. Google issued a statement but did not say when the site would be taken down.
Caught in the middle
Internet companies have increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs over hate speech and other volatile social issues, with politicians and others calling on them to do more to police their networks while civil libertarians worry about the firms suppressing free speech.
Twitter, Facebook, Google’s YouTube and other platforms have ramped up efforts to combat the social media efforts of Islamic militant groups, largely in response to pressure from European governments. Now they are facing similar pressures in the United States over white supremacist and neo-Nazi content.
Facebook confirmed Monday that it took down the event page that was used to promote and organize the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.
Facebook allows people to organize peaceful protests or rallies, but the social network said it would remove such pages when a threat of real-world harm and affiliation with hate organizations becomes clear.
“Facebook does not allow hate speech or praise of terrorist acts or hate crimes, and we are actively removing any posts that glorify the horrendous act committed in Charlottesville,” the company said in a statement.
Several companies acted
Several other companies also took action. Canadian internet company Tucows stopped hiding the domain registration information of Andrew Anglin, the founder of Daily Stormer. Tucows, which was previously providing the website with services masking Anglin’s phone number and email address, said Daily Stormer had breached its terms of service.
“They are inciting violence,” said Michael Goldstein, vice president for sales and marketing at Tucows, a Toronto-based company. “It’s a dangerous site and people should know who it is coming from.”
Anglin did not respond to a request for comment.
Discord, a 70-person San Francisco company that allows video gamers to communicate across the internet, did not mince words in its decision to shut down the server of Altright.com, an alt-right news website, and the accounts of other white nationalists.
“We will continue to take action against white supremacy, Nazi ideology, and all forms of hate,” the company said in a tweet Monday. Altright.com did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, Twilio Chief Executive Jeff Lawson tweeted Sunday that the company would update its use policy to prohibit hate speech. Twilio’s services allow companies and organizations, such as political groups or campaigns, to send text messages to their communities.
Arbiters of acceptable speech
Internet companies, which enjoy broad protections under U.S. law for the activities of people using their services, have mostly tried to avoid being arbiters of what is acceptable speech.
But the ground is now shifting, said one executive at a major Silicon Valley firm. Twitter, for one, has moved sharply against harassment and hate speech after enduring years of criticism for not doing enough.
Facebook is beefing up its content monitoring teams. Google is pushing hard on new technology to help it monitor and delete YouTube videos that celebrate violence.
All this comes as an influential bloc of senators, including Republican Senator Rob Portman and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, is pushing legislation that would make it easier to penalize operators of websites that facilitate online sex trafficking of women and children.
That measure, despite the noncontroversial nature of its espoused goal, was met with swift and coordinated opposition from tech firms and internet freedom groups, who fear that being legally liable for the postings of users would be a devastating blow to the internet industry.
Synthetic polymers, primarily plastics, are used to make a host of items, from paint to plastic bottles to sunglasses and DVDs. Imagine what could be created with a plastic that can be made to shimmy, and even crawl. Now a new polymer has been developed that actually walks like a caterpillar as it reacts to light. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us about it.
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Neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer moved its domain registration to Google after hosting firm GoDaddy said it would sever ties with the site that promoted Saturday’s deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A “whois” search of Internet domains on Monday listed Alphabet’s Google as registrar for The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website associated with the alt-right movement.
Representatives with Google could not immediately be reached for comment.
GoDaddy disclosed on Sunday via Twitter that it had given The Daily Stormer 24 hours to move its domain to another provider, saying it had violated the company’s terms of service.”
GoDaddy has previously come under sharp criticism for hosting The Daily Stormer and other sites that spread hate.
The company decided to boot the on Sunday out of fear that it could be used to incite further violence after the events in Charlottesville, including the death of Heather Heyer, who was fatally struck by a car allegedly driven by a man with white nationalist views.
“With the violence that occurred over the weekend, the company believed this site could incite additional violence,” said the person who was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
The hosting company’s rules of conduct ban using its services in a manner that “promotes, encourages or engages in terrorism, violence against people, animals or property.”
Daily Storm publisher Andrew Anglin could not immediately be reached for comment on GoDaddy’s ban.
Scottsdale, Arizona-based GoDaddy, is one of the largest U.S. Internet services firms with some 6,000 employees.
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Scientists from U.S. and Britain have found four planets, slightly larger than Earth, orbiting a star visible with a naked eye.
Using a technique so sensitive that it can measure tiny changes in the light emitted by stars, scientists at University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Hertfordshire detected the planets orbiting the star Tau Ceti, which is 12 light-years from Earth. Two of the planets orbit in the so-called habitable zone, meaning the surface water could possibly exist.
The changes in light are caused by gravitational pull of the planets orbiting the star.
Tau Ceti, in the south of the constellation Cetus, emits light spectrum similar to our sun but is about 25 percent smaller.
The two planets in its habitable zone are larger than Earth, but frequent bombardment by asteroids and comets from the star’s massive debris ring make them improbable candidates to sustain life.
Observations were done from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
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Some countries depend heavily on fossil fuels for power, including the Philippines. But now a kind of solar energy “flower” is among the clean power alternatives there. The Smartflower can produce 40 percent more energy than a traditional rooftop solar design. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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