About half of teenagers in the United States and Japan say they are addicted to their smartphones.

University of Southern California (USC) researchers asked 1,200 Japanese about their use of electronic devices. The researchers are with the Walter Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. Their findings were compared with an earlier study on digital media use among families in North America.

“Advances in digital media and mobile devices are changing the way we engage not only with the world around us, but also with the people who are the closest to us,” said Willow Bay, head of the Annenberg School.

The USC report finds that 50 percent of American teenagers and 45 percent of Japanese teens feel addicted to their mobile phones.

“This is a really big deal,” said James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, an organization that helped with the study. “Just think about it, 10 years ago we didn’t even have smart phones.”

Sixty-one percent of Japanese parents believe their children are addicted to the devices. That compares to 59 percent of the American parents who were asked.

Also, more than 1-in-3 Japanese parents feel they have grown dependent on electronic devices, compared to about 1-in-4 American parents.

Leaving your phone at home is ‘one of the worst things’

“Nowadays, one of the worst things that can happen to us is, like, ‘Oh, I left my phone at home,’” said Alissa Caldwell, a student at the American School in Tokyo. She spoke at the USC Global Conference 2017, which was held in Tokyo.

A majority of Japanese and American parents said their teenagers used mobile devices too much. But only 17 percent of Japanese teens agreed with that assessment. In the United States, 52 percent of teens said they are spending too much time on mobile devices.

Many respond immediately to messages

About 7-in-10 American teens said they felt a need to react quickly to mobile messages, compared to about half of Japanese teens.

In Japan, 38 percent of parents and 48 percent of teens look at and use their devices at least once an hour. In the United States, 69 percent of parents and 78 percent of teens say they use their devices every hour.

Naturally, that hourly usage stops when people are sleeping, the researchers said.

The devices are a greater cause of conflict among teens and parents in the United States than in Japan. One-in-3 U.S. families reported having an argument every day about mobile device use. Only about 1-in-6 Japanese families say they fight every day over mobile devices.

Care more about devices than your children?

But 20 percent of Japanese teens said they sometimes feel that their parents think their mobile device is more important than they are. The percentage of U.S. teens saying they feel this way is 6 percent.

In the United States, 15 percent of parents say their teens’ use of mobile devices worsens the family’s personal relationships. Eleven percent of teens feel their parents’ use of mobile devices is not good for their relationship.

The USC research was based on an April 2017 study of 600 Japanese parents and 600 Japanese teenagers. Opinions from American parents and teenagers were collected in a study done earlier by Common Sense Media.

Bay, the Annenberg School of Communications dean, said the research raises critical questions about the effect of digital devices on family life.

She said the cultural effects may differ from country to country, but “this is clearly a global issue.”
…

Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for showcasing Facebook’s virtual reality capability with a tour of hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico.

The Facebook founder and another executive discussed the platform’s virtual reality project through avatars in a video recorded live Monday.

The video begins with the avatars pictured on the roof of Facebook’s Mountain View, California, headquarters before heading to Puerto Rico by using a 360-degree video recorded by National Public Radio as a backdrop.

Zuckerberg later responded to critics, writing that his goal of showing “how VR can raise awareness and help us see what’s happening in different parts of the world” wasn’t clear. He says he’s sorry to anyone who was offended.

Facebook is also working to restore internet connectivity on the island and has donated money to the relief effort.
…

U.S. researchers said this week they have discovered a way to genetically engineer corn, the world’s largest commodity crop, to produce a type of amino acid found in meat.

The result is a nutritionally rich food that could benefit millions worldwide, while also reducing the cost of animal feed.  The breakthrough came in a report in the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal. 

Researchers say the process involves infusing corn with a certain type of bacteria in order to produce methionine, an amino acid generally found in meat.

“We improved the nutritional value of corn, the largest commodity crop grown on Earth,” Thomas Leustek, professor in the Department of Plant Biology at Rutgers University and co-author of the study, told VOA. “Most corn is used for animal feed, but it lacks methionine — a key amino acid — and we found an effective way to add it.”

The new method works by adding an E. coli bacteria into the genome of the corn plant, which then causes the methionine production in the plants leaves. According to the study, methionine in the corn kernels then increases by about 57 percent.

The scientists fed the genetically modified corn to chickens at Rutgers University in order to show it was nutritious for them, co-author Joachim Messing said.

Normally, chicken feed is prepared as a corn-soybean mixture, the authors said in a press release, but the mixture lacks methionine.

“Methionine is added because animals won’t grow without it. In many developing countries where corn is a staple, methionine is also important for people, especially children. It’s vital nutrition, like a vitamin,” Messing said.

If the genetically modified corn can be successfully deployed, those who live in developing countries “wouldn’t have to purchase methionine supplements or expensive foods that have higher methionine,” Leustek said.

Victor Beattie contributed to this report.
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While mountains of waste and trash keep growing in industrialized and developing countries, materials scientists are busy as ever experimenting with new methods for turning those scraps into something useful, from biofuel to food. VOA’s George Putic looks at some of the latest discoveries.
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U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Tuesday sharply criticized technology companies that have built strongly encrypted products, suggesting Silicon Valley is more willing to comply with foreign government demands for data than those made by their home country.

While echoing many arguments made by previous senior U.S. law enforcement officials, Rosenstein struck a harder line than his predecessors who led the Obama Justice Department, dismissing attempts to negotiate with the tech sector as a waste of time and accusing companies of putting sales over stopping crime.

“Company leaders may be willing to meet, but often they respond by criticizing the government and promising stronger encryption,” Rosenstein said during a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, according to a copy of his remarks. “Of course they do. They are in the business of selling products and making money. … We are in the business of preventing crime and saving lives.”

Rosenstein’s first lengthy comments on encryption signaled a desire for Congress to write legislation mandating that companies provide access to encrypted products when a law enforcement agency obtains a court order.

Tech companies and many cybersecurity experts say requiring law enforcement access to encrypted products will broadly weaken cybersecurity for everyone. U.S. officials have countered that default encryption settings hinder their ability to collect evidence needed to pursue criminals.

Previous officials have urged such an approach, but Rosenstein more directly criticized Silicon Valley. He cited a series of media reports to suggest U.S.-based companies are more willing to accede to demands for data from foreign governments than they are from the United States.

The remarks were quickly denounced by supporters of strong encryption.

“Despite his attempts at rebranding, a government backdoor by another name will still make it easier for criminals, predators and foreign hackers to break into our phones and computers,” Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement.

The decades-old feud over encryption reignited last year when the Justice Department attempted to force Apple Inc to break into an iPhone used by a gunman during a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

The clash subsided when an unidentified third party outside the government came forward with a way to crack the phone.

Some U.S. lawmakers expressed interest in legislation that would require companies to help law enforcement access encrypted data. The effort crumbled due to a lack of political support and a decision by the Obama administration to not endorse it.
…

Nearly a year after Facebook and Google launched offensives against fake news, they’re still inadvertently promoting it — often at the worst possible times.

Online services designed to engross users aren’t so easily retooled to promote greater accuracy, it turns out. Especially with online trolls, pranksters and more malicious types scheming to evade new controls as they’re rolled out.

Fear and falsity in Las Vegas

In the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, Facebook’s “Crisis Response” page for the attack featured a false article misidentifying the gunman and claiming he was a “far left loon.” Google promoted a similarly erroneous item from the anonymous prankster site 4chan in its “Top Stories” results.

A day after the attack, a YouTube search on “Las Vegas shooting” yielded a conspiracy-theory video that claimed multiple shooters were involved in the attack as the fifth result. YouTube is owned by Google.

None of these stories were true. Police identified the sole shooter as Stephen Paddock, a Nevada man whose motive remains a mystery. The Oct. 1 attack on a music festival left 58 dead and hundreds wounded.

The companies quickly purged offending links and tweaked their algorithms to favor more authoritative sources. But their work is clearly incomplete — a different Las Vegas conspiracy video was the eighth result displayed by YouTube in a search Monday.

Engagement first

Why do these highly automated services keep failing to separate truth from fiction? One big factor: most online services systems tend to emphasis posts that engage an audience — exactly what a lot of fake news is specifically designed to do.

Facebook and Google get caught off guard “because their algorithms just look for signs of popularity and recency at first,” without first checking to ensure relevance, says David Carroll, a professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

That problem is much bigger in the wake of disaster, when facts are still unclear and demand for information runs high.

Malicious actors have learned to take advantage of this, says Mandy Jenkins, head of news at social media and news research agency Storyful. “They know how the sites work, they know how algorithms work, they know how the media works,” she says.

Participants on 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” channel regularly chat about “how to deploy fake news strategies” around major stories, says Dan Leibson, vice president of search at the digital marketing consultancy Local SEO Guide.

One such chat just hours after the Las Vegas urged readers to “push the fact this terrorist was a commie” on social media. “There were people discussing how to create engagement all night,” Leibson says.

Eye of the beholder

Thanks to political polarization, the very notion of what constitutes a “credible” source of news is now a point of contention.

Mainstream journalists routinely make judgments about the credibility of various publications based on their history of accuracy. That’s a much more complicated issue for mass-market services like Facebook and Google, given the popularity of many inaccurate sources among political partisans.

The pro-Trump Gateway Pundit site, for example, published the false Las Vegas story promoted by Facebook. But it has also been invited to White House press briefings and counts more than 620,000 fans on its Facebook page.

Facebook said last week it is “working to fix the issue” that led it to promote false reports about the Las Vegas shooting, although it didn’t say what it had in mind.

The company has already taken a number of steps since December; it now features fact-checks by outside organizations, puts warning labels on disputed stories and has de-emphasized false stories in people’s news feeds.

Getting algorithms right

Breaking news is also inherently challenging for automated filter systems. Google says the 4chan post that misidentified the Las Vegas shooter should not have appeared in its “Top Stories” feature, and was replaced by its algorithm after a few hours.

Outside experts say Google was flummoxed by two different issues. First, its “Top Stories” is designed to return results from the broader web alongside items from news outlets. Second, signals that help Google’s system evaluate the credibility of a web page — for instance, links from known authoritative sources — aren’t available in breaking news situations, says independent search optimization consultant Matthew Brown.

“If you have enough citations or references to something, algorithmically that’s going to look very important to Google,” Brown said. “The problem is an easy one to define but a tough one to resolve.”

More people, fewer robots

Federal law currently exempts Facebook, Google and similar companies from liability for material published by their users. But circumstances are forcing the tech companies to accept more responsibility for the information they spread.

Facebook said last week that it would hire an extra 1,000 people to help vet ads after it found a Russian agency bought ads meant to influence last year’s election. It’s also subjecting potentially sensitive ads, including political messages, to “human review.”

In July, Google revamped guidelines for human workers who help rate search results in order to limit misleading and offensive material. Earlier this year, Google also allowed users to flag so-called “featured snippets” and “autocomplete” suggestions if they found the content harmful.

The Google-sponsored Trust Project at Santa Clara University is also working to create tags that could serve as markers of credibility for individual authors. These would include items such as their location and journalism awards, information that could be fed into future algorithms, according to project director Sally Lehrman.
…

Nearly a year after Facebook and Google launched offensives against fake news, they’re still inadvertently promoting it — often at the worst possible times.

Online services designed to engross users aren’t so easily retooled to promote greater accuracy, it turns out. Especially with online trolls, pranksters and more malicious types scheming to evade new controls as they’re rolled out.

Fear and falsity in Las Vegas

In the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, Facebook’s “Crisis Response” page for the attack featured a false article misidentifying the gunman and claiming he was a “far left loon.” Google promoted a similarly erroneous item from the anonymous prankster site 4chan in its “Top Stories” results.

A day after the attack, a YouTube search on “Las Vegas shooting” yielded a conspiracy-theory video that claimed multiple shooters were involved in the attack as the fifth result. YouTube is owned by Google.

None of these stories were true. Police identified the sole shooter as Stephen Paddock, a Nevada man whose motive remains a mystery. The Oct. 1 attack on a music festival left 58 dead and hundreds wounded.

The companies quickly purged offending links and tweaked their algorithms to favor more authoritative sources. But their work is clearly incomplete — a different Las Vegas conspiracy video was the eighth result displayed by YouTube in a search Monday.

Engagement first

Why do these highly automated services keep failing to separate truth from fiction? One big factor: most online services systems tend to emphasis posts that engage an audience — exactly what a lot of fake news is specifically designed to do.

Facebook and Google get caught off guard “because their algorithms just look for signs of popularity and recency at first,” without first checking to ensure relevance, says David Carroll, a professor of media design at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

That problem is much bigger in the wake of disaster, when facts are still unclear and demand for information runs high.

Malicious actors have learned to take advantage of this, says Mandy Jenkins, head of news at social media and news research agency Storyful. “They know how the sites work, they know how algorithms work, they know how the media works,” she says.

Participants on 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” channel regularly chat about “how to deploy fake news strategies” around major stories, says Dan Leibson, vice president of search at the digital marketing consultancy Local SEO Guide.

One such chat just hours after the Las Vegas urged readers to “push the fact this terrorist was a commie” on social media. “There were people discussing how to create engagement all night,” Leibson says.

Eye of the beholder

Thanks to political polarization, the very notion of what constitutes a “credible” source of news is now a point of contention.

Mainstream journalists routinely make judgments about the credibility of various publications based on their history of accuracy. That’s a much more complicated issue for mass-market services like Facebook and Google, given the popularity of many inaccurate sources among political partisans.

The pro-Trump Gateway Pundit site, for example, published the false Las Vegas story promoted by Facebook. But it has also been invited to White House press briefings and counts more than 620,000 fans on its Facebook page.

Facebook said last week it is “working to fix the issue” that led it to promote false reports about the Las Vegas shooting, although it didn’t say what it had in mind.

The company has already taken a number of steps since December; it now features fact-checks by outside organizations, puts warning labels on disputed stories and has de-emphasized false stories in people’s news feeds.

Getting algorithms right

Breaking news is also inherently challenging for automated filter systems. Google says the 4chan post that misidentified the Las Vegas shooter should not have appeared in its “Top Stories” feature, and was replaced by its algorithm after a few hours.

Outside experts say Google was flummoxed by two different issues. First, its “Top Stories” is designed to return results from the broader web alongside items from news outlets. Second, signals that help Google’s system evaluate the credibility of a web page — for instance, links from known authoritative sources — aren’t available in breaking news situations, says independent search optimization consultant Matthew Brown.

“If you have enough citations or references to something, algorithmically that’s going to look very important to Google,” Brown said. “The problem is an easy one to define but a tough one to resolve.”

More people, fewer robots

Federal law currently exempts Facebook, Google and similar companies from liability for material published by their users. But circumstances are forcing the tech companies to accept more responsibility for the information they spread.

Facebook said last week that it would hire an extra 1,000 people to help vet ads after it found a Russian agency bought ads meant to influence last year’s election. It’s also subjecting potentially sensitive ads, including political messages, to “human review.”

In July, Google revamped guidelines for human workers who help rate search results in order to limit misleading and offensive material. Earlier this year, Google also allowed users to flag so-called “featured snippets” and “autocomplete” suggestions if they found the content harmful.

The Google-sponsored Trust Project at Santa Clara University is also working to create tags that could serve as markers of credibility for individual authors. These would include items such as their location and journalism awards, information that could be fed into future algorithms, according to project director Sally Lehrman.

 
…

Nuclear proliferation watchdog CTBTO is using its worldwide array of monitoring stations to authenticate possible nuclear explosions, including the one claimed last month by North Korea. Kevin Enochs reports.
…

The World Solar Challenge began Sunday with 42 solar cars crossing Australia’s tropical north to its southern shores, a grueling 3,000 kilometer (1,864 mile) race through the outback.

The race from the northern city of Darwin to the southern city of Adelaide is expected to take a week for most cars, with speeds of 90-100 kilometers per hour (55-62 mph) powered only by the sun.

The fastest time was achieved by Japan’s Tokai University in 2009, completing the transcontinental race in 29 hours and 49 minutes.

Belgian team Punch Powertrain started first Sunday after recording a trial time of 2:03.8 for 2.97 km (1.78 miles), hitting an average speed of 83.4 kilometers per hour (51.5mph).

But reigning 2015 champions Nuon from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands believes it has a good chance of retaining the prize.

“All the cars look completely different (this year), and all we know is we’ve got a good car, we’ve got it running perfectly the last couple of days and we’re confident we’re going to do everything to win,” tour manager Sarah Benninkbolt said Sunday.

Race director Chris Selwood said the biennial event has attracted one of the best fields ever, with teams from more than 40 countries.

“This is the 30th anniversary of the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge and competitors want to be part of that. They have been drawn to the challenge of new regulations which reduced the solar array size without limiting the size of the solar car,” Selwood said.

Teams come from countries including the United States, Japan, Germany, Chile, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Belgium, Sweden, Iran, South Korea, India, Hong Kong, South Africa, Poland, Thailand, Turkey, Canada, Taiwan and Australia.

The Northern Territory Minister for Tourism and Culture, Lauren Moss said her government’s A$250,000 (US$194,150) sponsorship of the race showed it was committed to achieving 50 percent renewable energy for the territory by 2030.

“Innovation is at the heart of the event and the technology showcased this year will influence continuing solar innovation for vehicles and householders in the future,” she said.

“This event is a great promotion for the NT — it shows our ability to innovate to the world.”
…

Automakers trumpet new technology, including blind-spot warnings, backup cameras, and rear cross-traffic alerts, as a way to make driving safer. But road safety advocates say the explosion of technology in cars may actually do the opposite. Faith Lapidus reports.
…

Facebook and Google once aimed to connect the world. Now they would be happy just to reconnect part of it.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to send a “connectivity team” to help restore communications in ravaged Puerto Rico. Google parent company Alphabet offered to send its Wi-Fi balloons. They were among several tech companies proposing disaster response ideas, most aimed at getting phone and internet service up and running.

Some of these plans, of course, are more aspirational than others.

Battery Power

Tesla CEO Elon Musk often takes to Twitter to mull over ideas, but on Friday his musings about sending his company’s solar-powered batteries to help restore Puerto Rico’s power attracted the attention of the island’s governor.

“Let’s talk,” said Gov. Ricardo Rossello in a Friday tweet.

Musk agreed. Hours later, he announced he was delaying the unveiling of Tesla’s new semi-truck and diverting resources, in part to “increase battery production for Puerto Rico and other affected areas.”

The need for help in restoring power and communication after Hurricane Maria is great: The Puerto Rican energy authority reported Saturday that about 88 percent of the island is still without power. The Federal Communications Commission said Saturday that 82 percent of cell sites remain out in Puerto Rico; 58 percent are out of service in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The FCC’s daily status report also shows significant wireline, TV and radio outages remain in both U.S. territories. The agency formed a task force this week and approved an advance of $77 million to support carriers working to restore telecommunications services.

Vague Promises

But many offers of help from big companies remain somewhat vague. Google parent company Alphabet has proposed launching balloons over the island to bring Wi-Fi service to hard-to-reach places, as it has in other parts of the world.

The FCC announced Saturday that it’s approved an experimental license for Project Loon to operate in Puerto Rico. But that doesn’t mean it will able to get them in the air anytime soon.

“We’re grateful for the support of the FCC and the Puerto Rican authorities as we work hard to see if it’s possible to use Loon balloons to bring emergency connectivity to the island during this time of need,” said Libby Leahy, a spokesman for Alphabet’s X division.

But there are limitations, she said Saturday.

“To deliver signal to people’s devices, Loon needs be integrated with a telco partner’s network — the balloons can’t do it alone,” she said, adding that the company is “making solid progress on this next step.”

Collaborative efforts

Cisco Systems has sent a tactical team and says it is working with local government, emergency responders and service providers to facilitate restoration and recovery efforts. The company, along with Microsoft and others, backs the NetHope consortium, which specializes in setting up post-disaster communication networks and has field teams now operating in Puerto Rico and several other Caribbean islands.

“Communication is critical during a disaster,” Zuckerberg said after the hurricane hit, announcing that employees from his company’s connectivity team — the same group working to build high-altitude drones that can beam internet service down to Earth — were heading to Puerto Rico. But with its aircraft still in the testing phase, the company said Friday that the engineers it’s sent to Puerto Rico are focused on providing support to NetHope’s teams.

Smaller organizations

Much of the ground work is being spearheaded by nonprofit organizations and small firms with expertise in rural or emergency communications.

Lexington, Massachusetts-based Vanu Inc., which sets up wireless communications networks in rural parts of the United States, Africa and India, is sending dozens of its small, solar-powered cellular base stations to volunteer crews on the ground in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Aid workers are pairing Vanu’s devices with other technology, such as inflatable satellite antennas.

After setting up a network on the island of Vieques, off the main island of Puerto Rico, one team watched from a roof as local residents started getting text alerts from family members who had been trying to get in touch.

“They noticed everyone in the plaza pulling their phones out,” said CEO Vanu Bose. “You don’t have to announce you’ve lit up coverage. People know right away.”
…

Astronauts say seeing the Earth from a distance, where the whole planet comes into perspective, is a life-changing experience that makes you realize how beautiful and fragile it is. A group of enthusiasts in California set up a nonprofit organization that uses satellite imagery to spread this feeling to as many people as possible and raise awareness about the dangers of detrimental human activities. VOA’s George Putic has more.
…

A U.S. House of Representatives committee said Friday that it had scheduled a new hearing on Kaspersky Lab software as lawmakers review accusations that the Kremlin could use its products to conduct espionage.

Kaspersky Lab has strongly denied those allegations — which last month prompted the Trump administration to order civilian government agencies to purge the software from its networks — and agreed to send Chief Executive Eugene Kaspersky to Washington to testify before Congress.

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology announced the October 25 hearing a day after reports that Russian government-backed hackers stole highly classified U.S. cybersecrets in 2015 from a National Security Agency contractor who had Kaspersky software installed on his laptop.

The House science committee did not say who would be called to testify at the hearing.

Eugene Kaspersky last month told Reuters that the committee had invited him to testify at a September 27 hearing and that he would attend if he could get an expedited visa to enter the United States.

Classified session

That hearing was later canceled, though the committee held a closed-door classified session on Kaspersky software on September 26.

Kaspersky said in a statement on Friday that he hoped to attend the hearing.

“I look forward to participating in the hearing once it’s rescheduled and having the opportunity to address the committee’s concerns directly,” he said.

An appearance before Congress would mark Kaspersky’s most high-profile attempt to dispel long-standing accusations that his firm may be conducting espionage on behalf of the Russian government.

The investigation into the 2015 NSA hack is focused on somebody who worked at the agency’s Tailored Access Operations unit, a unit that uses computer hacking to gather intelligence, according to two people familiar with the classified probe.

Kaspersky anti-virus software was running on the contractor’s laptop at the time of the hack, and investigators are looking into whether hackers used the software to breach the computer and steal the data, said one of those sources.
…

In Orlando, Florida, where tourists come for the palm trees, shopping and theme parks, 18,000 women converged recently on the city’s giant convention center to talk about technology.

Amid technical sessions on artificial intelligence and augmented reality, the main theme of the Grace Hopper Celebration, the largest gathering of women in technology worldwide, was simple: How to make the tech industry more welcoming to women.

With women making up nearly 23 percent of the U.S. tech industry’s workforce, women should be playing a bigger role than they currently do in the industry, said Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“It’s time the world recognizes that the next Bill Gates may not look anything like the last one and that not every great idea comes wrapped in a hoodie,” said Melinda Gates, who worked at Microsoft earlier in her career.

This isn’t your typical technology conference.

First, its namesake “Grace Hopper” was a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and a groundbreaking computer programmer.

The conference also provided childcare and all-gender bathrooms. At some of the career booths, women were offered lip balm embossed with a corporate name. At one booth, they were invited to vamp it up, while promoting a new cloud computing service.

Chinyere Nwabugwu, a machine learning researcher at IBM Research in San Jose, California, said what she liked most was hearing about what successful women have done to get ahead.

“I’m just encouraged to work hard in my field, to be known for something, to put in my best, to be a good role model to others, mentor other people coming after me,” Nwabugwu said.

Town hall conference

Voice of America held a town hall at the conference where female leaders in technology talked about the progress that has been made and how far it has yet to go. There are concrete steps companies can take that will bring more women into the industry, the speakers said.

One simple thing companies can do is publicly announce job openings, rather than fill jobs from managers’ personal connections, said Danielle Brown, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Google.

Paula Tolliver, chief information officer at Intel, recently left one male-dominated industry — she was an executive at Dow Chemical — for the tech industry. But she said she was drawn by tech’s promise.

“Being CIO of Intel, and being at the middle of the ecosystem of Silicon Valley and working across many industries, it’s exciting,” Tolliver said. “And I personally, want more women to be more representative of that.”

Deborah Berebichez, a data scientist and co-host of the Discovery Channel’s Outrageous Acts of Science, said that she pursued science despite the lack of support from her parents.

Gatherings, such as the Grace Hopper Celebration, are solving two important problems in the tech industry, Berebichez said: How to interest more women in tech and how to help women already in tech to advance their careers.

Gender diversity issues

Both issues came to the forefront in August after a memo written by a male engineer at Google questioned the need for gender diversity programs in the industry.

In a 10-page internal memo that was leaked on social media, James Damore suggested fewer women are employed in the technology field because women “prefer jobs in social and artistic areas” due to “biological causes.”

Brown, who joined Google two weeks prior to the notorious memo, said that it upset both men and women at the company and didn’t reflect Google’s values. Damore was fired.

Berebichez’s message to women?  

“You’re the only one that can make your future,” Berebichez said. “Nobody else will do it for you so seek mentors, do whatever you have to do, study like crazy, be very entrepreneurial and craft your path, because you will be the only one that gets the fruits of your own labor.”
…

In Orlando, Florida this past week, 18,000 women from around the world gathered to talk about technology and how women can play a bigger role in shaping the industry’s future. VOA’s Michelle Quinn went to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the largest meeting of women in technology worldwide, to find out what women in tech want to change.
…

Microsoft said Thursday that it would team up with communities in six U.S. states to invest in technology and related jobs in rural and smaller metropolitan areas.

Company President Brad Smith launched the TechSpark program Thursday in Fargo, a metropolitan area of more than 200,000 people that includes a Microsoft campus with about 1,500 employees. Smith said the six communities are different by design and not all have a Microsoft presence.

Smith says TechSpark is a multiyear, multimillion-dollar investment to help teach computer science to students, expand rural broadband, and help create and fill jobs, among other things. The other programs will be in Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

“This is really a blueprint for private-public partnerships,” said North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, himself a former Microsoft executive.

Microsoft announced in July that it hoped to extend broadband services to rural America. The company said then that it would partner with rural telecommunications providers in 12 states with a goal of getting 2 million rural Americans high-speed internet over the next five years.

Microsoft planned to use “white space” technology, tapping buffer zones separating individual television channels in airwaves that could be cheaper than existing methods such as laying fiber-optic cable. The company had originally envisioned using it in the developing world, but shifted focus to the U.S. this summer.

Being ‘more present’

“We are a very diverse country,” Smith said. “It’s important for us to learn more about how digital technology is changing in all different parts of the country. So we are working to be more present in more places.”

Smith said there are 23.4 million Americans living in rural communities who don’t have broadband coverage and the TechSpark program is going to focus on bringing coverage to these six regions.

“The good news in North Dakota … is that it is in one of the strongest positions nationally in terms of the reach of broadband coverage,” he said. “But it still doesn’t reach everyone everywhere.”

Microsoft officials say there are nearly 500,000 unfilled computing jobs in the U.S. and that number is expected to triple by the end of next year. North Dakota currently has more than 13,000 job openings, many in computer software and engineering.

“The private sector doesn’t post a job unless they think they can make more money with the job filled than unfilled,” Burgum said. “So when we’re filling those jobs, we’re actually helping those companies become more profitable, which should help create more jobs. There’s no chicken-or-the-egg thing here.”

Microsoft on Thursday also selected Appleton, Wisconsin, as one of the six sites. The other communities will be announced later.

Smith said the success of the program would be measured first by how it provided digital skills to students and then by the job creation, economic growth and “making a difference in the lives of real people.”
…

As electric-powered cars are rapidly gaining popularity, the last frontier in private transportation is also opening up to alternative, eco-friendly power. Thanks to advances in battery and electric motor technology, several manufacturers are experimenting with light planes that are quiet, easy to maintain and cheap to fly. VOA’s George Putic reports.
…

General Motors’s self-driving unit, Cruise Automation, has more than doubled the size of its test fleet of robot cars in California during the past three months, a GM spokesman said on Wednesday.

As the company increases the size of its test fleet, it has also reported more run-ins between its self-driving cars and human-operated vehicles and bicycles, telling California regulators its vehicles were involved in six minor crashes in the state in September.

“All our incidents this year were caused by the other vehicle,” said Rebecca Mark, spokeswoman for GM Cruise.

In the past three months, the Cruise unit has increased the number of vehicles registered for testing on California streets to 100 from the previous 30 to 40, GM spokesman Ray Wert said.

Cruise is testing vehicles in San Francisco as part of its effort to develop software capable of navigating congested and often chaotic urban environments.

Investors are watching GM’s progress closely, and the automaker’s shares have risen 17 percent during the past month as some analysts have said the company could deploy robot taxis within the next year or two.

A U.S. Senate panel approved legislation on Wednesday that would allow automakers to greatly expand testing of self-driving cars. Some safety groups have objected to the proposal, saying it gives too much latitude to automakers.

As Cruise, and rivals, put more self-driving vehicles on the road to gather data to train their artificial intelligence systems, they are more frequently encountering human drivers who are not programmed to obey all traffic laws.

In filings to California regulators, Cruise said the six accidents in the state last month involved other cars and a bicyclist hitting its test cars.

The accidents did not result in injuries or serious damage, according to the GM reports. In total, GM Cruise vehicles have been involved in 13 collisions reported to California regulators in 2017, while Alphabet Inc’s Waymo vehicles have been involved in three crashes.

California state law requires that all crashes involving self-driving vehicles be reported, regardless of severity.

Most of the crashes involved drivers of other vehicles striking the GM cars that were slowing for stop signs, pedestrians or other issues. In one crash, a driver of a Ford Ranger was on his cellphone when he rear-ended a Chevrolet Bolt stopped at a red light.

In another instance, the driver of a Chevrolet Bolt noticed an intoxicated cyclist in San Francisco going the wrong direction toward the Bolt. The human driver stopped the Bolt and the cyclist hit the bumper and fell over. The bicyclist pulled on a sensor attached to the vehicle causing minor damage.

“While we look forward to the day when autonomous vehicles are commonplace, the streets we drive on today are not so simple, and we will continue to learn how humans drive and improve how we share the road together,” GM said in a statement on Wednesday.
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Horse manure will generate electricity for an international horse show in Finland this month in a new form of alternative energy, Finnish utility Fortum said Wednesday.

It said the Helsinki horse show in mid-October will be the first at which the event’s electricity needs, from scoreboards to lighting, are met by energy from the horses’ droppings.

The show, including Olympic and world champions in jumping and dressage, will require the equivalent of the annual dung produced by 14 horses to generate 140 megawatts (MW).

Scientists estimate that a horse can produce nine tons of manure a year.

“I am really proud that electricity produced with horse manure can be utilized for … Finland’s biggest and best-known horse show,” Anssi Paalanen, vice president of Fortum’s horsepower unit, said in a press release.

Fortum HorsePower provides wood chips from sawmills as a form of bedding for stables. It later collects the mixture of bedding and manure and uses it in energy production. The manure is burned like any other biofuel, Paalanen said.

The service was launched this autumn also in Sweden, where there are close to 3,000 horses producing energy.

During the event, Fortum HorsePower will deliver wood-based bedding for the 250 or so horses that stay in temporary stalls at the Helsinki Ice Hall and use the manure-bedding mix at Fortum’s Jarvenpaa power plant.

An estimated 135 tons of manure-bedding mixture will be generated during the event.
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Most Americans believe their jobs are safe from the spread of automation and robotics, at least during their lifetimes, and only a handful says automation has cost them a job or loss of income.

 Still, a survey by the Pew Research Center also found widespread anxiety about the general impact of technological change. Three-quarters of Americans say it is at least “somewhat realistic” that robots and computers will eventually perform most of the jobs currently done by people. Roughly the same proportion worry that such an outcome will have negative consequences, such as worsening inequality.

“The public expects a number of different jobs and occupations to be replaced by technology in the coming decades, but few think their own job is heading in that direction,” Aaron Smith, associate director at the Pew Research Center, said.

More than half of respondents expect that fast food workers, insurance claims processors and legal clerks will be mostly replaced by robots and computers during their lifetimes. Nearly two-thirds think that most retailers will be fully automated in 20 years, with little or no human interaction between customers and employers.

Americans’ relative optimism about their own jobs might be the more accurate assessment. Many recent expert analyses are finding less dramatic impacts from automation than studies from several years ago that suggested up to half of jobs could be automated.

Skills will need to be updated

A report last week, issued by the education company Pearson, Oxford University, and the Nesta Foundation found that just one in five workers are in occupations that will shrink by 2030.

Many analysts increasingly focus on the impact of automation on specific tasks, rather than entire jobs. A report in January from the consulting firm McKinsey concluded that less than 5 percent of occupations were likely to be entirely automated. But it also found that in 60 percent of occupations, workers could see roughly one-third of their tasks automated.

That suggests workers will need to continually upgrade their skills as existing jobs evolve with new technologies.

Few have lost jobs to automation

Just 6 percent of the respondents to the Pew survey said that they themselves have either lost a job or seen their hours or incomes cut because of automation. Perhaps not surprisingly, they have a much more negative view of technology’s impact on work. Nearly half of those respondents say that technology has actually made it harder for them to advance in their careers.

Contrary to the stereotype of older workers unable to keep up with new technology, younger workers — aged 18 through 24 — were the most likely to say that automation had cost them a job or income. Eleven percent of workers in that group said automation had cut their pay or work hours. That’s double the proportion of workers aged 50 through 64 who said the same.

The Pew survey also found widespread skepticism about the benefits of many emerging technologies, with most Americans saying they would not ride in a driverless car. A majority are also not interested in using a robotic caregiver for elderly relatives.

Self-driving cars

 Thirty percent of respondents said they think self-driving cars would actually cause traffic accidents to increase, and 31 percent said they would stay roughly the same. Just 39 percent said they thought accidents would decline.

More than 80 percent support the idea of requiring self-driving cars to stay in specific lanes.

The survey was conducted in May and had 4,135 respondents, Pew said.

 
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A lab in Cambodia is using cutting-edge technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, swarm robotics and 3-D printing to try and revolutionize bomb disposal.

The suite of products developed by Golden West Humanitarian Foundation’s Phnom Penh lab, in collaboration with universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Villanova, are designed to mesh all these technologies together into a “total knowledge” toolkit for deminers.

Replica bombs created on 3-D printers in Phnom Penh that reveal the precise inner mechanics of a growing range of killing machines have already been sold to clients around the world, including the United Nations and the United States military.

Before that, Cambodian teams pioneered explosive ordinance harvesting, in which material recovered from unexploded bombs is recast into detonators used in the field to destroy mines and UXO, or unexploded ordnance.

Now Golden West, which is funded by the U.S. State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, has turned its sights to the virtual world.

Cambodian-American Alan Tan, a former U.S. army bomb disposal tech and director of applied technology at Golden West, said Cambodians are using their country’s painful experience to become world leaders in solving the crippling problem of explosive war remnants disposal.

“We’re bringing this deeper and more thorough knowledge to our field, and I like to say democratizing explosive ordinance disposal so any country that has that need can have that need addressed even if they don’t have a multibillion-dollar military budget to do it,” he said.

Virtual bomb disposal

On a sunny afternoon, Tan throws large, unexploded bombs around in a (virtual) burned-out industrial park with reckless abandon.

The factory complex is an electronic canvass he is painting with familiar objects from the kind of bomb sites he regularly encountered in Iraq.

Thanks to a glitch in the matrix, a conga line of Humvees he’s picked up and hauled across the concrete enclosure are stuck awkwardly in the sky.

“That looks like a glitch,” the former deminer said, as he moved around in his virtual reality headset while others watched what he was seeing on a nearby monitor.

His virtual reality team, led by a Cambodian engineer, is debugging ahead of a launch of the Virtual EOD Training Room software at Ravens Challenge, the world’s biggest bomb disposal expo in Thailand.

Tan is walking around in a Virtual EOD Training Center — a program his lab has created to speed up the process of teaching the most critical skill in the field: rapid risk assessment.

He changes mode to show observers generic objects from daily life available in the simulation, then accidentally drops a rubbish bag on one of the bombs he has thrown on the ground in front of him. Ka-boom!

But Tan is still alive, and that is one of the great assets virtual reality training brings to instructors — safe but immersive practice grounds.

Shifting scenarios

The other major benefit is that instructors can rapidly create a vast number of completely different bomb disposal scenarios to train students on various pressures they might encounter in the field — in a similar way to flight simulators.

Edwin Faigmane has trained U.N. peacekeepers in many of the world’s worst conflict zones, including Afghanistan, South Sudan and Angola.

Faigmane says the software would be particularly useful in training explosive ordinance disposal techs working as peacekeepers outside of their country, such as the Cambodians currently deployed in South Sudan.

“Virtual reality would let them feel, would let them experience, would let them see the surroundings for themselves and let them prepare their minds, so when they actually get into South Sudan, they know what they can expect,” he said.

To help visualize the inner mechanisms of the many different bombs and land mines that EOD techs have to diffuse, Golden West has also developed augmented reality animations.

Using a smartphone and a roughly $10 bifocal headset, a user views a live feed — captured by the phone’s camera and mimicking the viewer’s natural point of view —projected to-scale onto an object in front of him or her.

With the aim of eventually pairing these technologies, one of the world’s largest databases of explosive ordnance, with very high-resolution imaging and “open source” access for EOD techs, is being built.

Machine learning systems that work off these images are also under development to automate the identification of different types of explosives, although this technology is still in its infancy.

Al Johnston is a former U.S. army EOD tech and director of Ravens Challenge, which serves as both a testing ground and marketplace for technology manufacturers like Golden West.

Tools like these are particularly important, Johnston said, because traditional alternatives such as cutting open real versions of devices or accessing classified U.S. databases are prohibitively expensive and difficult to negotiate.

“That is really good because that gets the knowledge into more hands at the level that are actually encountering the UXO all over the world,” he said.
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Legislation that could help usher in a new era of self-driving cars advanced in Congress on Wednesday after the bill’s sponsors agreed to compromises to address some concerns of safety advocates.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee approved the bill by a voice vote, a sign of broad, bipartisan support. It would allow automakers to apply for exemptions to current federal auto safety standards in order to sell up to 15,000 self-driving cars and light trucks per manufacturer in the first year after passage. Up to 40,000 per manufacturer could be sold in the second year, and 80,000 each year thereafter.

Action by the full Senate is still needed and differences with a similar bill passed by the House would have to be worked out before the measure could become law.

The bill initially would have allowed manufacturers to sell up to 100,000 self-driving vehicles a year, but that number was reduced in last-minute negotiations. In another change, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would evaluate the safety performance of the vehicles before increasing the number of vehicles manufacturers can sell.

Supporters of the bill, which was sought by the auto industry, say it would be a boon to safety since an estimated 94 percent of crashes involve human error. They say it would also help the disabled.

The bill “is primarily about saving lives,” but it will also increase U.S. international competitiveness and create jobs, said Sen. Gary Peters, D-Michigan.

Safety advocates said the bill has been significantly improved, but they still have serious concerns. Joan Claybrook, a NHTSA administrator under President Jimmy Carter, said the bill is one of the “biggest assaults” ever on the landmark 1966 law that empowered the federal government to set auto safety standards because it permits such large and unprecedented number of exemptions to those standards.

Automakers are “making guinea pigs out of their car buyers,” she said.

Under the bill, the NHTSA would have 180 days after an application in which to grant or deny the exemption. Manufacturers must show that they can provide an equivalent of safety. Safety advocates say six months isn’t enough time for an agency that is undermanned and lacks expertise in self-driving technology to effectively make such determinations.

The bill is broad enough to permit exemptions to standards that protect occupants in a crash, like air bags, safety advocates said.

There are no federal safety standards for many of the technologies at the heart of self-driving cars, like software and sensors, and there is no sign that the Trump administration would create such standards. Administration and auto and technology industry officials suggest that new regulations would be unable to keep up with rapid developments in technology and would slow deployment of self-driving cars.

The bill pre-empts state and local governments from enacting their own safety standards in the absence of federal standards. Industry officials have complained that being forced to comply with a patchwork of state safety laws would be unmanageable. But another compromise made to the bill allows states to continue their traditional roles of licensing vehicles and regulating auto insurance even if their actions affect the design of vehicles. Wrongful death lawsuits against manufacturers would also be allowed in states that permit them.

Automakers have experienced the largest number of recalls for safety defects in the industry’s history in recent years. General Motors, for example, was found to have buried evidence of an ignition switch defect that ultimately caused the recall of 2.6 million small cars worldwide. The switches played a role in at least 124 deaths and 275 injuries.

Also, about 70 million defective Takata air bag inflators are being recalled in the U.S. The inflators are responsible for up to 19 deaths worldwide and more than 180 injures.
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A small lab in Cambodia is developing some big tech in the field of bomb disposal. The augmented and virtual reality products developed by Cambodian-led international teams aim to revolutionize how deminers are trained. Golden West Humanitarian Foundation is working with big universities such as MIT and Villanova to help turn a devastating legacy of unexploded ordnance in Cambodia into a source of global expertise and respect. David Boyle has this report.
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The Latest on Google’s new-product showcase (all times local):

10:45 a.m.

Google is introducing wireless headphones as its new line of Pixel smartphones joins the shift away from a headphone jack.

Although they will connect wirelessly, the company’s Pixel Buds will come with a short cord so you can drape them around your neck.

Google removed the headphone jack from the second generation of its Pixel phones to make them thinner and waterproof. The new phones also feature built-in stereo speakers.

Besides playing music, the Pixel buds work with translation software built in the new phones to make it easier to converse in different languages. The translation feature will also be made available in an update to Pixel models released last year.

The Pixel buds will sell for almost $160 and ship next month.

10:30 a.m.

Google is borrowing from Apple’s playbook as it takes on its rival in high end of the smartphone market.

The second generation of Google’s Pixel phones unveiled Wednesday feature larger, brighter screens that take up more of the phone’s front, changes that Apple is also making with its iPhone X scheduled to be released next month.

Both the Pixel XL and the 5-inch Pixel will also get rid of the headphone jack, something Apple did with the iPhone last year.

Google also souped up the already highly rated camera on the Pixel, boasting that it will take even better photos than the iPhone.

The smaller Pixel will sell for almost $650, $50 less than the iPhone 8. The Pixel XL will sell for almost $850, or $50 more than the iPhone 8 Plus. Prices for the iPhone X start at $1,000.

10 a.m.

Google is introducing different sizes of its internet-connected speaker to compete against similar devices from Amazon and Apple.

The Google Home Mini unveiled Wednesday is a button-sized speaker covered in fabric. It includes the same features featured in a cylindrical speaker that Google rolled out last year in response to Amazon’s Echo.

The Mini will cost almost $50, roughly the small price as Amazon’s smaller speaker, the Echo Dot. The standard Google Home speaker costs almost $130.

The Google Home Max is a rectangular speaker with superior acoustics for playing music, mimicking Apple’s HomePod.

Google is selling the Home Max for almost $400, $50 more than the HomePod. Both speakers are due in December.

Google’s voice-activated digital assistant will serves as the brains for all the speakers.
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