Syrian Refugees Earn Money, Cultivate Understanding, Teaching Arabic Online

A handful of New Yorkers have gathered at New York University to practice conversing in Arabic. Their two conversation partners have joined via Skype, video images projected side-by-side on a TV monitor.

The scene would be nothing out of the ordinary, save for the fact that the conversation partners, Ghayath and Rasha, are recently displaced Syrian refugees.

They are among some 50 refugees working with NaTakallam, a New York startup that pairs Arabic language learners, most based in the U.S., with displaced Syrians for paid, one-on-one conversation practice sessions over Skype.

NaTakallam sessions have garnered more than $110,000 for refugee instructors since launching in August 2015, according to the startup. Instructors keep $10 of the $15 paid by students for a one hour session. For the many Syrian refugees who must often start over and adjust to life in entirely new countries, the earnings supplement work that is already difficult to secure.

The idea for NaTakallam (Arabic for “we speak”) grew out of Aline Sara’s desire to improve her own Arabic speaking skills as a Lebanese-American. “The opportunities to practice Arabic were . . . kind of limited in New York, or extremely expensive for what I could afford at the time,” said the startup founder and CEO.

Typical Arabic classes also tend to teach Modern Standard Arabic, which Sara describes as “a Shakespearean version” of Arabic. “You don’t speak that way in your day-to-day activities,” she said. Conversational sessions provide the opportunity to practice regional dialects of the language. Most Syrians speak Levantine Arabic, one of the most widely understood dialects among Arabic speakers.

Instructors

For instructors like Ghayath, a Syrian refugee who has resettled in Italy, the language sessions are also an opportunity for cultural exchange. “We choose to speak together about daily life, about their interests, about my life, their life … the news.”

“I always say NaTakallam is my window to the world, because I travel every day through this small screen,” he added.

Students sign on for a variety of reasons, whether they’re studying related subjects such as political science, history or journalism or are part of the Arab diaspora and hoping to improve their native language skills. Other students may be tourists preparing for a trip abroad. Ghayath assesses each student’s particular language needs and tailors lessons accordingly.

Beyond the financial independence NaTakallam offers, Sara stresses the importance of bringing awareness and understanding to refugee communities.

“We’re always talking about refugees en masse. We don’t take the time to individualize them, to humanize them. This is a direct way,” said Sara, “You’re connecting in a one-on-one setting, people get to know each other. I think it’s very powerful.”

 

China to Get American Beef and Gas Under Trade Agreement

A sweeping trade agreement, ranging from banking to beef, has been reached between Washington and Beijing, the U.S. Commerce Department announced on Thursday.

“It was pretty much a Herculean accomplishment to get this done,” said U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. “This is more than has been done in the whole history of U.S.-China relations on trade.”

The breakthrough results from an agreement U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping made during their meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, on April 6.

Trump “was briefed more or less every single day” as negotiations progressed since then, Ross said.

Beef imports

Following one more round of “technical consultations,” China has agreed to allow U.S. beef imports no later than July 16, consistent with international food and animal safety standards, Ross told reporters at the White House.

The United States Cattlemen’s Association applauded the agreement, saying market access to China is crucial for its members.

“Success in this arena will drive the U.S. cattle market and increase demand for U.S. beef” in China, association president Kenny Graner told VOA.

In exchange, Washington and Beijing are to resolve outstanding issues that would allow imports to the U.S. of cooked poultry from China “as soon as possible,” according to the Commerce Department.

Another significant breakthrough will see American liquefied natural gas (LNG) going to China. Under the agreement Chinese companies will be permitted “at any time to negotiate all types of contractual arrangement with U.S. LNG exporters, including long term contracts,” according to the Commerce Department.

This is “a very big change,” said Ross, noting China is trying to wean itself off coal at a time “it doesn’t produce enough natural gas to meet its needs.”

Financial, other business services

Among other action listed in the 100-Day Action Plan:

* China is to allow, by July 16, “wholly foreign-owned financial services firms” to provide credit ratings services and to begin licensing procedures for credit investigation.

* U.S.-owned suppliers of electronic payment services (EPS) will be able to apply for licensing in China under new guidelines.

* China is to issue bond underwriting and settlement licenses to two qualified U.S. financial institutions by July 16.

* China’s National Biosafety Committee is to meet by the end of this month to conduct science-based evaluations of all eight pending U.S. biotechnology product applications “to assess the safety of the products for their intended use.” Those that pass the tests are to get certificates within 20 working days.

The outcome of the joint dialogue will also see a United States delegation attending China’s Belt and Road Forum in Beijing next week.

A U.S.-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue will be held this summer, according to the Commerce Department, to deepen engagement on these and other issues.

“There are probably 500 items you could potentially discuss” in the wider one-year plan for bilateral trade, Ross added.

Cash and Chemicals: For Laos, Chinese Banana Boom a Blessing and Curse

Kongkaew Vonusak smiles when he recalls the arrival of Chinese investors in his tranquil village in northern Laos in 2014. With them came easy money, he said.

The Chinese offered villagers up to $720 per hectare to rent their land, much of it fallow for years, said Kongkaew, 59, the village chief. They wanted to grow bananas on it.

In impoverished Laos, the offer was generous. “They told us the price and asked us if we were happy. We said okay.”

Elsewhere, riverside land with good access roads fetched at least double that sum.

Three years later, the Chinese-driven banana boom has left few locals untouched, but not everyone is smiling.

Experts say the Chinese have brought jobs and higher wages to northern Laos, but have also drenched plantations with pesticides and other chemicals.

Last year, the Lao government banned the opening of new banana plantations after a state-backed institute reported that the intensive use of chemicals had sickened workers and polluted water sources.

China has extolled the benefits of its vision of a modern-day “Silk Road” linking it to the rest of the world – it holds a major summit in Beijing on May 14-15 to promote it.

The banana boom pre-dated the concept, which was announced in 2013, although China now regards agricultural developments in Laos as among the initiative’s projects.

Under the “Belt and Road” plan, China has sought to persuade neighbors to open their markets to Chinese investors. For villagers like Kongkaew, that meant a trade-off.

“Chinese investment has given us a better quality of life. We eat better, we live better,” Kongkaew said.

But neither he nor his neighbors will work on the plantations, or venture near them during spraying. They have stopped fishing in the nearby river, fearing it is polluted by chemical run-off from the nearby banana plantation.

Chinese frustration

Several Chinese plantation owners and managers expressed frustration at the government ban, which forbids them from growing bananas after their leases expire.

They said the use of chemicals was necessary, and disagreed that workers were falling ill because of them.

“If you want to farm, you have to use fertilizers and pesticides,” said Wu Yaqiang, a site manager at a plantation owned by Jiangong Agriculture, one of the largest Chinese banana growers in Laos.

“If we don’t come here to develop, this place would just be bare mountains,” he added, as he watched workers carrying 30-kg bunches of bananas up steep hillsides to a rudimentary packing station.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was not aware of the specific issues surrounding Chinese banana growers in Laos, and did not believe they should be linked directly to the Belt and Road initiative.

“In principle we always require Chinese companies, when investing and operating abroad, to comply with local laws and regulations, fulfil their social responsibility and protect the local environment,” he told a regular briefing on Thursday.

Laos’ Ministry of Agriculture did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment for this article.

China is the biggest foreign investor in Laos, a landlocked country of 6.5 million people, with over 760 projects valued at about $6.7 billion, according to Chinese state-run media.

This influence is not only keenly felt in the capital Vientiane, where Chinese build shopping complexes and run some of the city’s fanciest hotels. It also extends deep into rural areas that have remained largely unchanged for decades.

Banana rush

Lao people say Chinese banana investors began streaming across the border around 2010, driven by land shortages at home.

Many headed to Bokeo, the country’s smallest and least populous province.

In the ensuing years, Lao banana exports jumped ten-fold to become the country’s largest export earner. Nearly all of the fruit is sent to China.

For ethnic Lao like Kongkaew, Chinese planters paid them more for the land than they could earn from farming it.

For impoverished, hill-dwelling minorities such as the Hmong or Khmu, the banana rush meant better wages.

At harvest time, they can earn the equivalent of at least $10 a day and sometimes double that, a princely sum in a country where the average annual income was $1,740 in 2015, according to the World Bank.

They are also most exposed to the chemicals.

Most Chinese planters grow the Cavendish variety of banana which is favoured by consumers but susceptible to disease.

Hmong and Khmu workers douse the growing plants with pesticides and kill weeds with herbicides such as paraquat. Paraquat is banned by the European Union and other countries including Laos, and it has been phased out in China.

The bananas are also dunked in fungicides to preserve them for their journey to China.

Switching crops

Some banana workers grow weak and thin or develop rashes, said Phonesai Manivongxai, director of the Community Association for Mobilizing Knowledge in Development (CAMKID), a non-profit group based in northern Laos.

Part of CAMKID’s work includes educating workers about the dangers of chemical use. “All we can do is make them more aware,” she said.

This is an uphill struggle. Most pesticides come from China or Thailand and bear instructions and warnings in those countries’ languages, Reuters learned. Even if the labeling was Lao, some Hmong and Khmu are illiterate and can’t understand it.

Another problem, said Phonesai, was that workers lived in close proximity to the chemicals, which contaminated the water they wash in or drink.

In a Lao market, Reuters found Thai-made paraquat openly on sale.

However, some workers Reuters spoke to said they accepted the trade-off. While they were concerned about chemicals, higher wages allowed them to send children to school or afford better food.

There is no guarantee the government’s crackdown on pesticide use in banana production will lead to potentially harmful chemicals being phased out altogether.

As banana prices fell following a surge in output, some Chinese investors began to plant other crops on the land, including chemically intensive ones like watermelon.

Zhang Jianjun, 46, co-owner of the Lei Lin banana plantation, estimated that as much as 20 percent of Bokeo’s banana plantations had been cleared, and said some of his competitors had decamped to Myanmar and Cambodia.

But he has no plans to leave. The environmental impact on Laos was a “road that every underdeveloped country must walk” and local people should thank the Chinese, he said.

“They don’t think, ‘Why have our lives improved?’ They think it’s something that heaven has given them, that life just naturally gets better.”

Dutch Inventor Years Ahead in Plan to Clean Up Massive Plastic Patch in Pacific

A Dutch entrepreneur has come up with an invention he says will allow him to start cleaning up a massive floating garbage patch in the Pacific two years ahead of schedule.

“To catch the plastic, act like plastic,” Boyan Slat said Thursday in Utrecht.

Slat’s Ocean Cleanup foundation plans to scoop up most of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a gargantuan floating island of plastic between the U.S. states of Hawaii and California.

When he discovered that his original plan of attaching large barriers to the sea floor to trap the plastic would not work, Stal devised a different plan.

The barriers will instead be weighed down by floating anchors and travel in the same sea currents as the garbage, trapping it.

Slat says the new plan will allow him to start collecting the trash within a year — two years ahead of schedule.

The young entrepreneur’s system is making waves among America’s super-rich philanthropists. Last month, his foundation announced it had raised $21.7 million in donations since November, clearing the way for large-scale trials at sea. Among donors were Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

 

Nancy Wallace, director of the Marine Debris Program at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said much of the garbage in the world’s oceans is found throughout the water column — at different depths. That would likely put some of it out of reach of Slat’s barriers.

 

However she applauded The Ocean Cleanup for bringing the issue to a broad public.

 

“The more people are aware of it, the more they will be concerned about it,” Wallace said. “My hope is that the next step is to say `what can I do to stop it?’ and that’s where prevention comes in.”

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not just an ugly reminder of a throwaway human society — it is also a danger to sea life and humans. Tiny bits of plastic can find their way into the food chain.

Ocean Cleanup says 8 million tons of plastic wind up in the seas every year. One piece of plastic can take decades to break down.

Slat on Thursday brought out an intact plastic crate fished from the Pacific last year. The date 1977 was stamped on it.

Some information for this report from AP.

Americans Rush to Trademark Catchy Phrases

Ideas were flying at a brainstorming session to create a slogan for a group of North Carolina Democrats when Catherine Cloud blurted out a phrase that made a colleague’s eyes light up: “Because this is America.”

The words were quickly scrawled on a notepad, and the New Hanover County Democratic Party in Wilmington began its scramble to own the phrase. It applied days later for a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

From President Donald Trump’s dash to own “Keep America Great” for his 2020 re-election campaign — even before he took office — to a rush by a foundation for the victims of the September 11 attacks to claim “Let’s Roll” just days after New York’s Twin Towers were reduced to rubble, Americans are rushing to trademark catchy phrases.

There were 391,837 trademark applications filed last year, with the number growing an average of 5 percent annually, government reports show. The USPTO does not break out how many of those applications were for phrases.

‘That’s Hot’

The surge is the result of headline-grabbing cases like socialite Paris Hilton’s winning settlement of a lawsuit over her trademarked catchphrase “That’s Hot” from her former television reality show, said trademark attorney Howard Hogan of Washington.

“It can’t help but inspire others,” Hogan said. “It feels good to get recognition of something you feel you have created.”

Trademarks can mean cash from everything from bumper stickers to thongs printed with the protected phrase. More important for some, however, is claiming ownership of a powerful message.

” ‘Because this is America’ is a rallying cry that focuses on what we have in common, rather than what divides us,” Cloud said.

The phrase is the tagline in a commercial that was set for online release Thursday about the New Hanover Democrats’ key issues: “Clean water. Because this is America,” “Quality education for every child. Because this is America,” and “No matter your ethnicity, you are welcome here. Because this is America.”

Mindful that the slogan that could easily be employed by rival Republicans, the county Democratic committee filed to trademark it just 18 days after Cloud said it.

Trump looks ahead

Two days before Trump’s inauguration on January 20, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. applied to trademark the phrase he said he intends to use for his 2020 re-election campaign: “Keep America Great,” both with and without an exclamation point. The campaign committee already owns the trademark for Trump’s 2016 slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Just 15 days after Todd Beamer inspired fellow airline passengers to overwhelm hijackers above a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, the Todd M. Beamer Memorial Foundation applied to trademark his rallying cry, “Let’s Roll.”

Three days after “Nasty Woman” grabbed headlines when Trump used it to describe his opponent Hillary Clinton in an October 19, 2016, debate, entrepreneurs across America started filing trademark applications for the phrase. There are at least 11 applications pending to trademark “Nasty Woman” for the sale of products as wide-ranging as pillows, wine, firearms, scented body spray, mugs, backpacks and jewelry.

Typically it takes about 18 months for the Patent Office to grant a trademark.

But it can take much longer, as cartoonist Bob Mankoff of The New Yorker learned when he tried to trademark the caption to a 1993 cartoon. Two decades passed before he was allowed to register it on January 19, 2016.

Ironically, the phrase aptly describes Mankoff’s anticipated payday from the sale of merchandise, bearing the words that first appeared under his cartoon of a businessman trying to schedule a meeting: “How about never — is never good for you?”

US Official Urges American Small Businesses to Export Abroad

The head of the U.S. Small Business Administration urged American businessmen and entrepreneurs to enter the global market, telling the United Nations on Thursday that just 1 percent of small businesses are currently exporting overseas.

Linda McMahon said the nearly 29 million small businesses in America “are the engine of our economy” and create two out of three new jobs — but she stressed that exporting is a key component of small business growth.

“Businesses that export are less likely to go out of business and more likely to grow faster,” she told the Small Business Knowledge Summit.

“That’s because 96 percent of all of the world’s consumers and over three-quarters of the world’s purchasing power are outside of the United States,” she said. “Yet right now, only 1 percent of all of America’s small businesses are exporters.”

McMahon conceded that becoming an exporter, especially for small businesses, isn’t easy.

“Small businesses are challenged by access to information, capital and barriers to market entry,” she told several hundred government and business officials and diplomats at the summit organized by the International Council for Small Business.

McMahon said the Trump administration and her agency are committed to ensuring equal access for small businesses to international markets, expanding export opportunities, and reducing or eliminating “trade and investment barriers that disproportionately impact small businesses.”

She said small businesses are hardest hit trying to finance trade deals and by compliance challenges.

“Globally over half of all declined trade finance requests to banks were submitted by small businesses,” McMahon said. “In the United States, over one-third of all of our small businesses find trade finance hard to obtain for foreign sales.”

She said the Small Business Administration works with banks to try to address this challenge and find “tailored, trade finance products” so that small businesses can finance foreign growth when the private sector is unable or unwilling to provide loans.

Kushner Companies: No Investor Meetings in China This Weekend

The sister of White House adviser Jared Kushner won’t be attending an investor conference in China this weekend as reported after she was criticized for trying to raise money there last weekend, using the lure of a U.S. visa program.

Nicole Kushner Meyer, who had been representing her family’s company in China, came under fire for what critics said was an attempt to attract investors using the family’s ties to the White House.

Meyer mentioned her brother at a conference in Beijing on Saturday. Marketing materials for the event also promoted her as Jared’s sister and cited the Kushner family’s “celebrity” status.

The family real estate company, Kushner Cos., later apologized. It said Meyer had not meant to attract investors by using her brother’s name.

The Kushner Cos. said Thursday that no representative would be attending conferences in China this weekend. The Washington Post earlier reported that a Chinese website had listed Meyer as planning to attend an event in Shenzhen on Saturday.

The family company is trying to raise money to help build a 79-story apartment building in Jersey City, New Jersey, called One Journal Square. The company is seeking 300 wealthy Chinese to invest a total of $150 million.

Anchor tenant bows out

The building is facing difficulty. Office-sharing company WeWork confirmed this week that it was canceling plans to lease space as an anchor tenant. And the Jersey City mayor recently came out against awarding a valuable tax break for the building.

The EB-5 visa program offers a path to citizenship for wealthy investors willing to put at least $500,000 in rural areas or places with high unemployment in the United States. After as little as two years, participants can then apply for a fast-track green card and later U.S. citizenship.

The Kushner Cos. has used the program to finance other projects, including another building in Jersey City. That one, Trump Bay Street, is in a licensing deal with President Donald Trump’s company.

Jared Kushner, who stepped down as CEO of Kushner Cos. to assume his White House role, is married to Trump daughter and White House adviser Ivanka Trump.

Critics say the EB-5 program has not helped the downtrodden areas of the country enough and has become a way for developers to essentially sell visas in exchange cheap financing.

At a press briefing earlier this week, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Jared Kushner had no involvement in the One Journal Square project. An attorney for Jared Kushner said he had sold his stake to a trust benefiting other members of the Kushner family and would recuse himself from related policy matters while serving as an adviser to Trump.

Sinister Text Messages Reveal High-tech Front in Ukraine War

Television journalist Julia Kirienko was sheltering with Ukrainian soldiers and medics two miles (three kilometers) from the front when their cellphones began buzzing over the noise of the shelling. Everyone got the same text message at the same time.

“Ukrainian soldiers,” it warned, “they’ll find your bodies when the snow melts.”

Text messages like the one Kirienko received have been sent periodically to Ukrainian forces fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country. The threats and disinformation represent a new form of information warfare, the 21st-century equivalent of dropping leaflets on the battlefield.

“This is pinpoint propaganda,” said Nancy Snow, a professor of public diplomacy at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies.

The Associated Press has found that the messages are almost certainly being sent through cell site simulators, surveillance tools long used by U.S. law enforcement to track suspects’ cellphones. Photos, video, leaked documents and other clues gathered by Ukrainian journalists suggest the equipment may have been supplied by the Kremlin.

The texts have been arriving since 2014, shortly after the fighting erupted. The AP documented nearly four dozen of them, including the one that Kirienko received on Jan. 31 in Avdiivka, a battle-scarred town outside the principal rebel-held city of Donetsk.

The messages typically say things such as “Leave and you will live” or “Nobody needs your kids to become orphans.” Many are disguised to look as if they are coming from fellow soldiers.

Fake towers

In 2015, Ukrainian soldiers defending the railroad town of Debaltseve were sent texts appearing to come from comrades claiming their unit’s commander had deserted. Another set of messages warned that Ukrainian forces were being decimated. “We should run away,” they said.

“They were mostly threatening and demoralizing, saying that our commanders had betrayed us and we were just cannon fodder,” said Roman Chashurin, who served as a tank gunner in Debaltseve.

Ukrainian military and intelligence services had no comment on the phenomenon, but government and telecommunications officials are well aware of what’s going on.

A 2014 investigation by a major Ukrainian cellphone company concluded that cell site simulators were to blame for the rogue messages, according to an information security specialist who worked on the inquiry. He spoke on the condition that neither he nor his former firm be identified, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

Col. Serhiy Demydiuk, the head of Ukraine’s national cyberpolice unit, said in an interview that the country’s intelligence services knew the devices were being used as well.

“Avdiivka showed that the Russian side was using fake towers,” he said. “They are using them constantly.”

Cell site simulators work by impersonating cellphone towers, allowing them to intercept or even fake data. Heath Hardman, a former U.S. Marines signals analyst who operated the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, said they were routinely used by American military intelligence officers to hunt insurgents.

Sending mass text messages in wartime isn’t entirely new. The Islamic militant group Hamas sent threatening messages to random Israelis during the 2009 conflict over Gaza, for example, though it is not clear how that was done.

Effectiveness of texts

Cell site simulators significantly sharpen the ability of propagandists to tailor their messages to a specific place or situation, according to Snow, the academic.

“There’s just something about viewing a message on your phone that just makes people more susceptible or vulnerable to its impact,” she said.

The type of hardware involved remains a matter of speculation. But last year, the Ukrainian investigative website InformNapalm published a video and photographs appearing to show a LEER-3, a Russian truck-mounted electronic warfare system, in the Donetsk area. InformNapalm also disclosed what it described as leaked Russian military documents discussing the LEER-3’s deployment to the Luhansk area of eastern Ukraine.

A 2015 article in Russia’s Military Review magazine said the LEER-3 has a cell site simulator built into a drone that is capable of acting over a 6-kilometer-wide area and hijacking up to 2,000 cellphone connections at once. That makes it a “pretty plausible” source for the rogue texts in Ukraine, said Hardman, the former signals analyst.

Russia’s Defense Ministry did not return a request for comment. Moscow has long denied any direct role in the fighting in Ukraine, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.

The effectiveness of the propaganda texts is an open question. Soldiers say they typically shrug them off.

“I can’t say that it had any influence on us,” said Chashurin, the former tank gunner. “We were even joking that they must be so afraid of us the only thing they can do is to spam us with these texts.”

But Svetlana Andreychuk, a volunteer who has made frequent trips to the front line to distribute food and supplies, said the threats and mockery sometimes hit a nerve in a grinding conflict that has claimed more than 9,900 lives.

“Some people are psychologically influenced,” she said. “It’s coming regularly. People are so tired. You see people dying. And then you face this.”

What’s Holding Back Self-driving Cars? Human Drivers

In just a few years, well-mannered self-driving robotaxis will share the roads with reckless, law-breaking human drivers. The prospect is causing migraines for the people developing the robotaxis.

A self-driving car would be programmed to drive at the speed limit. Humans routinely exceed it by 10 to 15 mph (16 to 24 kph) — just try entering the New Jersey Turnpike at normal speed. Self-driving cars wouldn’t dare cross a double yellow line; humans do it all the time. And then there are those odd local traffic customs to which humans quickly adapt.

 

In Los Angeles and other places, for instance, there’s the “California Stop,” where drivers roll through stop signs if no traffic is crossing. In Southwestern Pennsylvania, courteous drivers practice the “Pittsburgh Left,” where it’s customary to let one oncoming car turn left in front of them when a traffic light turns green. The same thing happens in Boston. During rush hours near Ann Arbor, Michigan, drivers regularly cross a double-yellow line to queue up for a left-turn onto a freeway.

 

“There’s an endless list of these cases where we as humans know the context, we know when to bend the rules and when to break the rules,” said Raj Rajkumar, a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who leads the school’s autonomous car research.

 

Although autonomous cars are likely to carry passengers or cargo in limited areas during the next three to five years, experts say it will take many years before robotaxis can coexist with human-piloted vehicles on most side streets, boulevards and freeways. That’s because programmers have to figure out human behavior and local traffic idiosyncrasies. And teaching a car to use that knowledge will require massive amounts of data and big computing power that is prohibitively expensive at the moment.

 

“Driverless cars are very rule-based, and they don’t understand social graces,” said Missy Cummings, director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab.

 

Driving customs and road conditions are dramatically different across the globe, with narrow, congested lanes in European cities, and anarchy in Beijing’s giant traffic jams. In India’s capital, New Delhi, luxury cars share poorly marked and congested lanes with bicycles, scooters, trucks, and even an occasional cow or elephant.

 

Then there is the problem of aggressive humans who make dangerous moves such as cutting cars off on freeways or turning left in front of oncoming traffic. In India, for example, even when lanes are marked, drivers swing from lane to lane without hesitation.

 

Already there have been isolated cases of human drivers pulling into the path of cars such as Teslas, knowing they will stop because they’re equipped with automatic emergency braking.

 

“It’s hard to program in human stupidity or someone who really tries to game the technology,” says John Hanson, spokesman for Toyota’s autonomous car unit.

 

Kathy Winter, vice president of automated driving solutions for Intel, is optimistic that the cars will be able to see and think like humans before 2030.

 

Cars with sensors for driver-assist systems already are gathering data about road signs, lane lines and human driver behavior. Winter hopes auto and tech companies developing autonomous systems and cars will contribute this information to a giant database.

 

Artificial intelligence developed by Intel and other companies eventually could access the data and make quick decisions similar to humans, Winter says.

 

Programmers are optimistic that someday the cars will be able to handle even Beijing’s traffic. But the cost could be high, and it might be a decade or more before Chinese regulators deem self-driving cars reliable enough for widespread public use, said John Zeng of LMC Automotive Consulting.

 

Intel’s Winter expects fully autonomous cars to collect, process and analyze four terabytes of data in 1 { hours of driving, which is the average amount a person spends in a car each day. That’s equal to storing over 1.2 million photos or 2,000 hours of movies. Such computing power now costs over $100,000 per vehicle, Zeng said. But that cost could fall as more cars are built.

 

Someday autonomous cars will have common sense programmed in so they will cross a double-yellow line when warranted or to speed up and find a gap to enter a freeway. Carnegie Mellon has taught its cars to handle the “Pittsburgh Left” by waiting a full second or longer for an intersection to clear before proceeding at a green light. Sensors also track crossing traffic and can figure out if a driver is going to stop for a sign or red light. Eventually there will be vehicle-to-vehicle communication to avoid crashes.

 

Still, some skeptics say computerized cars will never be able to think exactly like humans.

 

“You’ll never be able to make up a person’s ability to perceive what’s the right move at the time, I don’t think,” said New Jersey State Police Sgt. Ed Long, who works in the traffic and public safety office.

Iraq, Algeria Support Extension of Oil Production Cuts

Iraq and Algeria support the extension of oil production cuts by OPEC and non-OPEC producers through the end of the year to try to boost prices, they said in a joint statement Thursday.

The oil ministers of the two countries held a press conference in Baghdad where Iraqi Oil Minister Jabar Ali al-Luaibi said “there might be new ideas to be presented” at an OPEC meeting on May 25, without providing further details.

In late November, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed to cut production by 1.2 million barrels a day, the first such reduction agreement since 2008. The following month, 11 non-OPEC oil-producing countries pledged to cut an additional 558,000 barrels a day, reaching an overall reduction of 1.8 million.

In March, OPEC announced the possibility that such cuts would be extended.

Iraq – OPEC’s second-largest producer and a country that relies on oil revenues for nearly 95 percent of its budget – committed to reduce daily production by 210,000 barrels to 4.351 million.

News of a possible extension of the OPEC cuts and reports that U.S. crude stockpiles have dropped by 5.2 million barrels last week slightly boosted worldwide oil prices.

Crude oil sold for over $100 a barrel in the summer of 2014, before bottoming out below $30 a barrel in January 2016. Brent Crude, used to price international oils, now trades at around $50 a barrel in London.

Alaska Natives Look to Arctic Council to Preserve Pristine Region, Way of Life

The foreign ministers of the eight Arctic Council nations will meet to discuss climate change this week, amid news last month that temperatures in the pristine region are warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world.

A high-level meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his counterparts from Russia, Greenland, Canada, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland begins Thursday in Fairbanks.

As Tillerson joins the talks, the Trump administration has not yet decided whether to remain a party to the 2015 U.N. Paris Agreement on responding to climate change.

Watch: Alaskan Natives Look to Arctic Council to Preserve Waters, Way of Life

Any changes to U.S. climate policy would directly affect the lives of Alaska Natives, who depend on the Arctic Sea to survive.

In recent reports, scientists said the temperatures in the Arctic were warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, sea ice was at record lows and permafrost was thawing.

If current warming rates hold, the world could see an ice-free Arctic by 2040, researchers said.

Worrisome

The studies have alarmed Alaska Natives.

Gabe Tegoseak spoke to VOA about growing up in an Inuit household.

“To put that in perspective, I grew up with no running water most of my life,” Tegoseak said. “A very old-school tradition, my parents they favored it that way and it humbles me.

“I had to walk to a freshwater lake, break some ice on my sled — and this is a wooden sled I used to pull around and break it up — and then bring it home, and that was our drinking water, this big block of ice,” he said.

As the ice block melted, Tegoseak’s family first used it for drinking water, then to wash their faces and bodies, and then to clean the floor, not wasting a drop, he said.

Many people in Alaska, including indigenous people, depend on the oil and gas industry for a paycheck, he told VOA. But he said he thought an executive order signed this month by President Donald Trump to reverse Obama administration policy and open up Arctic waters to drilling was shortsighted.

“We’re trading our rights and our ability to subsistence hunt and live traditionally, which is over 10,000-plus years old, for a cash economy, which [is a] different mindset. So when we catch a whale, for instance, we share it all,” Tegoseak said.

“Our view is that everybody gets to [have] a piece of whale, and it doesn’t matter, creed or color. Everybody gets a fair share,” he stressed.

Tegoseak said he had asked many Alaska Natives on the North Slope about what they’d do if they had to choose between having their beloved whale meat, called muktuk, or an iPad. They responded that they’d choose muktuk, he said.

Seen as shortsighted

Many environmental experts agree that drilling in the Arctic is risky and shortsighted, including Sally Yozell of the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research center in Washington.

“I think it’s rather shortsighted for a number of reasons. You know the Arctic waters are cold, and it’s hard to — we have not figured out yet how to address an oil or gas calamity up there at all. I mean, the cold water, all one has to do to is to have witnessed what happened with the Exxon Valdez many years ago to see that that oil stayed in those waters for 20 years,” Yozell said.

The Valdez tanker struck a reef in Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. Nearly 11 million gallons of oil was spilled.

Experts said the accelerated melting of Arctic Sea ice will most likely lead to more shipping, drilling and other economic activity in the region.

 

Mark Royce of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship told VOA he was concerned.

“Unfortunately, the retreating ice, the diminution of the perpetual winters there, and the warming of their environment is giving rise to still more steam for plans for rapacious exploration and exploitative development,” Royce said. “It’s a vicious cycle. But what we’re seeing in the Arctic, in the very seas around Alaska, presents just a particularly virulent form of this at a crucial time.”

Tillerson’s remarks will most likely be followed closely by the other seven Arctic Council partners, who want to make climate change a focus of the final statement when the meeting concludes Thursday.

Uber Chases GrabTaxi in Myanmar, Expanding in Southeast Asia

Uber is launching its private ride-hailing service in the Myanmar commercial capital of Yangon on Thursday, aiming to tap into one of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing online markets.

The launch follows Singapore-based GrabTaxi’s debut by about two months.

Uber is one of the world’s largest on-demand transportation platforms. It is seeking an alliance with the government to smooth acceptance of the use of private vehicles for commercial transport.

A taxi ride in Myanmar usually involves negotiating prices, no use of meters and a lack of air conditioning or seat belts. Using a ride-hailing app is still a relatively new concept, though the practice has been gaining in popularity.

Local travel services start-up Oway and Hello Cabs, a rival service run by a construction and auto dealership tycoon, also provide ride-hailing services. 

“I definitely want to try Uber,” said Nyan Zay Htet, 26, a company worker who was haggling with a driver over a fare on a downtown street in Yangon. “I welcome having international companies come in because it can be more convenient for us if we don’t have to bargain over prices and can just hop in and go.”

More than two-thirds of Southeast Asians are younger than 40 and the number going online to buy goods and services is soaring. A recent research report by Google and the Singaporean investment arm Temasek put the potential ride-sharing market in six larger regional markets at $13 billion by 2025, up from $2.5 billion in 2015.

With more than 50 million people, Myanmar is growing fast and its public transport networks are not keeping up. Taxis are plentiful in Yangon, with local media reporting authorities estimate there are more than 50,000 on the city’s jammed roads. The industry is something of a free-for-all, with non-licensed drivers turning their cars into taxis as they please. But the government has said it intends to crack down on that.

Incomes for most people are still low, so price competition may be key.

An online Uber fare estimator put the base fare in Yangon at 1,500 kyats (pronounced chuts) ($1.09) with a minimum charge of 1,800 kyats ($1.31).

Uber has faced trouble from regulators in various markets, including China, France, Spain and Mexico. But generally they target services transporting paying customers using private vehicles that are not registered for public transport, not ride-hailing that uses smartphone apps to call licensed taxis.

Study: US Foreclosure Activity Drops to Lowest Level Since 2005 

Housing foreclosure activity in the United States dropped to the lowest level since 2005 last month, according to a business research group.

ATTOM Data Solutions tracks default notices, auctions and bank repossessions across the nation and says the number of actions dropped 23 percent from a year ago. That means more than 77,000 homeowners missed payments, and banks took some kind of action to encourage the repayment of their loans.

Severe problems in the U.S. housing market, and sales of securities backed by sometimes-faulty mortgages, played a key role in the financial crisis, which is one reason that investors and economists watch the housing market closely.

Seattle, a city in the Pacific Northwest state of Washington, did the best in this study, with the number of foreclosure notices dropping 38 percent from the same time a year ago. Atlantic City, New Jersey, had the worst foreclosure problem in this study, with one out of every 237 housing units getting a notice of some kind.

China Simulates Extended Moon Stays Amid Space Drive

China is testing the ability for future astronauts to stay on the moon for extended periods, as Beijing accelerates its space program and looks to put people on the surface of the moon within the next two decades.

The official Xinhua news agency said volunteers would live in a “simulated space cabin” for between 60-200 days over the next year helping scientists understand what will be needed for humans to “remain on the moon in the medium and long terms”.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for China to become a global power in space exploration, with plans to send a probe to the dark side of the moon by 2018, the first ever such trip, and to put astronauts on the moon by 2036.

“While it remains unclear exactly how long China’s first lunar explorers will spend on the surface, the country is already planning for longer stays,” Xinhua said.

Two groups of four volunteers will live in the simulated cabin “Yuegong-1” to test how a life-support system works in a moon-like environment. A similar 105-day trial was carried out successfully in 2014.

The system, called the Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS), allows water and food to be recycled and is key to any Chinese probes to the moon or beyond.

“The latest test is vital to the future of China’s moon and Mars missions and must be relied upon to guarantee the safety and health of our astronauts,” Liu Zhiheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told the news agency.

The Yuegong-1 cabin has a central living space the size of a “very small urban apartment” and two “greenhouses” for plants.

In March, China announced plans to launch a space probe to bring back samples from the moon this year, while the country’s first cargo space craft docked with an orbiting space lab in April, a major step as Beijing looks to establish a permanently manned space station by 2022.

Despite the advances in China’s space program for military, commercial and scientific purposes, China still lags behind the United States and Russia.

China: Silk Road Plan Not Tied to Xi Presidency

China’s President Xi Jinping initiated the ambitious Belt and Road development plan but it has become a world plan not tied to his presidency, the Commerce Ministry said Wednesday, days before Xi hosts a global forum on the initiative.

The forum in Beijing next week will draw heads of state to discuss Xi’s plan to expand trade links between Asia, Africa and Europe through billions of dollars in infrastructure investment.

Representatives from more than 100 countries will attend China’s biggest diplomatic event of the year, though only one leader from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, is set to join.

China says that between 2014 and 2016, its businesses signed projects worth $304.9 billion along inland and maritime corridors of the plan, also known as the New Silk Road. But some of the projects could be in development for years.

Judging by recent precedent in China’s political system, Xi is slated to step down from the presidency in early 2023 at the end of his second five-year term.

Asked what guarantee the world had that the initiative would go on after Xi’s second term, Vice Minister of Commerce Qian Keming told a news briefing that its vitality lay in countries’ hopes for development and not in the idea of “who proposed it or what term in office there is later.”

“The Belt and Road initiative was proposed by President Xi in 2013, but this initiative is not an individual proposal, or merely left at a proposal level. Rather it is an initiative that has been widely received by the whole world. It is jointly owned by everyone,” Qian said.

China has repeatedly rebuffed concern that the plan is part of a grand strategy to expand its economic interests for selfish gain and to seek global dominance, saying that anyone can join the plan to boost common prosperity.

Xi has used the initiative to help portray China as an open economy, distinct from a rising wave of global protectionism.

However, the government has faced criticism from foreign business groups and governments alike, who say it has done little to remove discriminatory policies and market barriers that favor Chinese companies.

Foreign business groups have questioned whether multinational companies would be able to compete with Chinese firms through the plan in transparent bidding processes.

Zhang Xingfu, an official from the Commerce Ministry’s cooperation department, played down such concerns.

“Chinese enterprises conducting investment and cooperative business in countries along the Belt and Road initiative will … actively participate in project bidding, and cooperate and compete with international enterprises in the same industries on the same platform,” Zhang said.

Tesla Selling Solar Tiles, Says They Look Like Traditional Roof

Electric carmaker Tesla has added another product to its lineup: Solar roof tiles.

As of Wednesday, customers worldwide could order a solar roof on Tesla’s website. Installations will begin next month in the U.S., starting with California. Installations outside the U.S. will begin next year, the company said.

The glass tiles were unveiled by Tesla last fall just before the company merged with solar panel maker SolarCity Corp. They’re designed to look like a traditional roof, with options that replicate slate or terracotta tiles. The solar tiles contain photovoltaic cells that are invisible from the street.

Guaranteed for life of home

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said one of the drawbacks to home solar installations has been the solar panels themselves: They’re often awkward, shiny and ugly. Buyers will want Tesla’s roof, he said, because it looks as good or better than a normal roof.

“When you have this installed on your house, you’ll have the best roof in the neighborhood. The aesthetics are that good,” Musk said in a conference call with media.

The roof is guaranteed for the life of the home, which is longer than the 20-year lifespan for a typical, nonsolar roof, Musk said. It has gone through the same hail, fire and wind testing that normal roofs endure.

Tesla’s website includes a calculator where potential buyers can estimate the cost of a solar roof based on the size of their home, the amount of sunlight their neighborhood receives and federal tax credits. They can also put down a refundable $1,000 deposit to reserve a place in line.

$42 per square foot

Tesla said the solar tiles cost $42 per square foot to install, making them far more costly than slate, which costs around $17 per square foot, or asphalt, which costs around $5. But homes would only need between 30 and 40 percent of their roof tiles to be solar; the rest would be Tesla’s cheaper nonsolar tiles, which would blend in with the solar ones.

It would cost $69,100 to install a solar roof with 40-percent solar tiles on a 2,600-square-foot roof in suburban Detroit, according to Tesla’s website. That includes a $7,000 Tesla Powerwall, a battery unit that stores the energy from the solar panels and powers the home. The roof would be eligible for a $15,500 federal tax credit and would generate an estimated $62,100 in electricity over 30 years. Over that time period, Tesla estimates, the homeowner would save $8,500.

Tesla said the typical homeowner can expect to pay $21.85 per square foot for a Tesla solar roof. The cost can be rolled into the homeowner’s mortgage payments and paid for over time, the company said.

Sales to be slow at first

Musk wouldn’t say how many orders the company expects to get this year. He expects the initial ramp-up to be slow.

“It will be very difficult and it will take a long time, and there will be some stumbles along the way. But it’s the only sensible vision of the future,” Musk said.

Palo Alto, California-based Tesla Inc. is making the solar tiles at its Fremont, California, factory initially. But eventually all production will move to a joint Tesla and Panasonic Corp. factory in Buffalo, New York. Panasonic makes the photovoltaic cells used in the solar tiles.

Tesla said it would be installing equipment in the Buffalo factory over the next few months.

Amazon Trounces Rivals in Battle of the Shopping ‘Bots’

Earlier this year, engineers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. who track rivals’ prices online got a rude surprise: the technology they were using to check Amazon.com several million times a day suddenly stopped working.

Losing access to Amazon.com Inc.’s data was no small matter. Like most big retailers, Wal-Mart relies on computer programs that scan prices on competitors’ websites so it can adjust its listings accordingly. A difference of even 50 cents can mean losing a sale.

But a new tactic by Amazon to block these programs — known commonly as robots or bots — thwarted the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer.

Its technology unit, @WalmartLabs, was unable to work around the blockade for weeks, forcing it to retrieve Amazon’s data through a secondary source, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The previously unreported incident offers a case study in how Amazon’s technological prowess is helping it dominate the retail competition.

Now the largest online retailer in the world, Amazon is best known by consumers for its fast delivery, huge product catalog and ambitious moves into areas like original TV programming. But its mastery of the complex, behind-the-scenes technologies that power modern e-commerce is just as important to its success.

Dexterity with bots allows Amazon not only to see what its rivals are doing, but increasingly to keep them in the dark when it undercuts them on price or is quietly charging more.

“Benchmarking against Amazon is going to become hard,” said Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon manager who now sells pricing software to retailers as chief executive of Mountain View, California-based Boomerang Commerce.

A Wal-Mart spokesman declined to discuss the January episode but said the company improves its technology regularly and has multiple tools for tracking items. He said the company offers value not only through pricing but from discounts for in-store pickup and other benefits.

A spokeswoman for Amazon said the company is aware of competitors using bots to check its listings and denied any “campaign” to stop them. “Nothing has changed recently in how we manage bots on our site,” she said. Still, she said, “we prioritize humans over bots as needed.”

Bots can slow down a website, a big motivator for retailers to block them.

Reuters interviewed 21 people familiar with bots and how they are deployed, including current and former Wal-Mart employees, former Amazon employees and outside specialists. Many spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issues publicly.

Most pointed to Amazon’s leadership in the burgeoning bot wars.

The company’s technological edge has been good for its profit margin, and it’s proving a winning formula for investors.

Shares of the internet powerhouse have risen about 15-fold since the market’s bottom in March 2009, while the S&P 500 has more than tripled in value. Amazon hit $100 billion in annual sales in 2015 — faster than any company in history, it said.

Brave new world

Bot-driven pricing has represented a massive change for the retail industry since Amazon helped pioneer the practice more than a decade ago.

Traditionally, brick-and-mortar stores changed prices no more than weekly because of the time and expense needed to swap labels by hand.

In the world of e-commerce, though, retailers update prices with ease, sometimes multiple times a day, helped by algorithms that consider inventory levels, sales forecasts and rivals’ pricing data.

To stay in the game, companies such as online wholesaler Boxed, based in New York, depend on a variety of methods including bots to ensure they do not lag others’ price moves for even 20 minutes.

“That’s like a lifetime during Christmas,” said Chief Executive Chieh Huang, whose company sells bulk staples like toilet paper and pet food. “If we’re not decently priced, we’ll see it almost immediately” in sales declines.

  

Disguised as humans

Using bots to view massive amounts of data on public websites — a process known as crawling or scraping — has many purposes. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, for example, constantly crawls the Web to gather information for its search engine results and to sell ads.

In e-commerce, though, the use of bots has developed into a cat-and-mouse game. Companies try to thwart the practice on their own websites while aiming to penetrate their competitors’ defenses. Third-party services abound to help less-savvy retailers.

To protect data from rivals, some retail websites use what’s known as a “CAPTCHA” — typically a distorted string of letters and numbers that humans can read but most bots can’t. Amazon shies away from the practice because it annoys some customers.

For merchants seeking to evade such defenses, disguising their computer programs as real shoppers is key. Some pricing technology experts have programmed computer cursors to meander through a Web page in the way a person might, instead of going directly to the prized data. Another technique is to use multiple computer addresses so that retailers cannot track a barrage of clicks to a single source.

“It is an arms race,” said Keith Anderson, a senior vice president at e-commerce analytics firm Profitero, based in Ireland. “Every week or every month, there’s some new approach from both sides.”

Amazon’s maneuver that halted Wal-Mart in January took aim at a specialized Web browser called PhantomJS. Unlike, say, Internet Explorer, this browser is designed specifically for programmers — a telltale clue that its users are not typical shoppers. Amazon put up a digital curtain to hide its listings from PhantomJS users, according to three people familiar with the situation.

It was unclear how the move, which was not aimed at Wal-Mart in particular, affected other companies.

Tests conducted in recent weeks for Reuters show that among major U.S. retail chains, Amazon had by far the most sophisticated bot detection in place, both for its home page and for two popular items selected by Reuters because they change price frequently — a De’Longhi coffee maker and a Logitech webcam.

The tests were run by San Francisco-based Distil Networks, which sells anti-bot tools. In one of the tests, Distil programmed bots to hit each retailer’s website 3,000 times, but slowly enough to mimic a person clicking through listings. This tricked most retail behemoths, but not Amazon.

Blocked bots would not have seen, for instance, that Amazon’s price for the De’Longhi espresso machine changed four times in a single 24-hour period starting on the morning of April 25, according to price tracking website camelcamelcamel.com. During that time, the price swung by more than 10 percent, from a low of $80.06 to $88.16.

Swarming with bots

Despite Amazon’s capabilities, the sheer volume of crawling on its site is staggering. At times, as many as 80 percent of the clicks on Amazon product listings have been from bots, people familiar with the matter say, compared with just a third or more of the traffic on other large sites.

In addition to rivals seeking price data, that traffic includes bots from university researchers studying competition, search engines, advertising services and even fraudsters trying to break into Amazon accounts.

For Wal-Mart, a small group in Silicon Valley directs its automated pricing strategy while dozens of engineers in India and around the world handle the code, current and former Wal-Mart employees said.

Amazon had about 40 engineers who would covertly extract and organize rivals’ data with bots as of several years ago, one of the people interviewed said. Amazon did not discuss the size or structure of its teams working with bots.

According to one U.S. patent application, Amazon is working on encryption technology that would force bots, but not humans, to solve a complicated algorithm to gain access to its Web pages.

“Amazon has both the competency to detect bot traffic and the wherewithal to do something about it,” said Scott Jacobson, a former Amazon manager and now managing director of Madrona Venture Group. That “isn’t the case for most retailers.”

 

Microsoft Adds Tools to Flag Bad Content in Amazon, Google Faceoff

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday turned up the heat on other technology giants by launching new image and video recognition products which could help it court businesses worried about running ads next to offensive content.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said its new Video Indexer can identify faces, voices and emotions in moving pictures. Separately, its Custom Vision Search lets companies build apps that recognize images with just a few lines of code.

For brands, knowing what’s in the videos that they sponsor has become a hot-button issue since major companies began canceling ad deals with Alphabet Inc’s Google this year over hate speech playing on its subsidiary YouTube.

Microsoft’s Video Indexer has similarities to a tool Google launched in March; Amazon.com Inc also said last month it could flag insulting images via a cloud-based service.

Microsoft’s latest moves underscore how its focus has evolved from its staple Windows software to the cloud, where it is competing with Amazon to sell data storage and computing power. Extra analytics such as image recognition may prove key to luring Web developers.

“It’s hard to understand what’s in the video” the longer it is, said Irving Kwong, a senior product director at Microsoft, in an interview ahead of the company’s developer conference Build. He said Video Indexer, which analyzes videos far faster than humans can, could help a user “harness and get more out of the video content that you have.”

The tools launched in preview by the Microsoft Cognitive Services unit on Wednesday, including a decision recommendation service, have one aim apart from winning business: data.

Microsoft views the tools as a way to put powerful computing into people’s hands and improve the tools at the same time, because processing more data is key to reaching artificial intelligence. Others including Amazon are pursuing this strategy, with the prize being a new revenue stream.

Research firm International Data Corporation has forecast the market for such tools will balloon to over $47 billion in sales in 2020 from $8 billion in 2016.

Microsoft pulled back the curtain on experiments that are further afield, too. It announced a new Cognitive Labs unit and the so-called Project Prague: technology to allow people to control computers simply with hand gestures.

Facebook to Play Down Links to Websites With Deceptive Ads

Facebook is planning to intensify its crackdown on so-called clickbait websites, saying it will begin giving lower prominence to links that lead to pages full of deceptive or annoying advertisements.

The downgrade of the links was expected to take effect beginning on Wednesday on News Feed, the home page of Facebook where people go to see posts from friends and family.

Facebook said it wanted to downplay links that people post to websites that have a disproportionate volume of ads relative to content, or that have deceptive or sexually suggestive ads along the lines of “5 Tips to be Amazing in Bed” or “1 Crazy Tip to Lose Weight Overnight!”

Links to websites with pop-up ads or full-screen ads also would be downplayed, it said.

People scrolling through their News Feed are often disappointed when they click on such links and do not find valuable information, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of ads and business platform, said in an interview.

“People don’t want to see this stuff,” he said. “We’re just trying to figure out how to find it and rank it further down News Feed when possible.”

Facebook uses a computer algorithm to determine which posts people see first from friends and family, and it frequently refines the algorithm to keep up with spam or other concerns.

The company said in August it was adjusting the algorithm to downplay news stories with clickbait-style headlines, a style of headline that intentionally withholds information or misleads people to get them to click on them.

In December, facing criticism that hoaxes and fake news stories spread too easily on Facebook in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election on November 8, the company made it easier for people to report those kinds of posts.

Facebook, the world’s largest social media network with 1.9 billion monthly users, has enormous power with its algorithms to potentially drive traffic to media publishers or stymie it.

The company said it reviewed hundreds of thousands of websites linked to from Facebook to identify those with little substance but lots of disruptive or shocking ads.

Bosworth declined to name any websites Facebook wants to target. He said only publishers of spam needed to worry about seeing less traffic, and other publishers could see their traffic go up.

“This is a small number of the worst of the worst,” he said.

New Study Warns of Wage Theft in US

Analysts at a liberal research institution in Washington say U.S. employers are stealing $15 billion a year from workers by failing to pay legally required minimum wages.

The Economic Policy Institute says the wage theft hits nearly one-fifth of low wage workers in the 10 largest U.S. states. The study’s authors say affected workers lose an average of $64 a week, or $3,300 a year out of their modest salaries.

Young people, women, minorities and immigrants are often stuck in low-level jobs and thus are most likely to be affected by wage theft. EPI says the shortfall obviously hurts workers, but also slows demand for goods and services, which can crimp economic growth.

On Thursday, government officials will look at the job market from a different angle, when the weekly jobless claims are published.  Economists track the number of Americans who sign up for unemployment assistance to gauge the health of the market.

A survey of economists shows most experts expect the number of such layoffs to rise slightly but still remain at a relatively low level consistent with a strong job market. A separate study produces the U.S. unemployment rate, which was just 4.4 percent in April, less than half the rate during the worst of the recession. Some analysts say with fewer unemployed workers seeking jobs, employers may have to boost wages to attract and keep staff members.  

Higher wages could contribute to inflation, and so could rising prices of imports, including oil. Friday, officials will report the latest data on price changes at the retail level with the Consumer Price Index. Experts predict the study will show inflation rose about 2 percent over the past year, a moderate level.  

U.S. central bank officials are supposed to guide the economy in ways that keep prices stable and unemployment low. They try to cool inflation by raising interest rates, but do so cautiously to avoid stalling the economy and hurting job growth. That is why experts quoted in the financial press say the Federal Reserve will raise rates again, slightly, at their June meeting.

In Vitro Fertilization Could Help Restore Vulnerable Coral Reefs

It’s no secret that the world’s coral reefs are at risk. Pollution, dredging, overfishing and, especially, acidic, warming waters are pushing these complex ecosystems to the brink of destruction, and marine scientists and researchers have been stymied in attempts to restore their health.

Saving them isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s a necessity if we want to keep our oceans healthy and viable. Coral reefs provide nurseries for nearly a quarter of the ocean’s fisheries, help protect shorelines from storms, and offer underwater wonders for snorkelers and divers.

Now, a project at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences offers hope for what marine biologist Bart Shepherd calls ‘one of the most magical and beautiful places on Earth’. “It’s this incredible city of organisms that all learn to live together.  All these animals are competing to try and take over space and try to get access to sunlight, to nutrients in the water.”

Shepherd is director of the Academy’s Steinhart Aquarium, and, with the Academy’s curator of ichthyology, Luiz Rocha, directs the appropriately-named Hope for Reefs initiative.

Reefs under stress

Human activity and increasingly warm and acidic ocean water are taking a heavy toll on the world’s coral reefs. A recent aerial survey found more than two-thirds of the coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is experiencing “shocking” amounts of bleaching, and Rocha says human-induced climate change is devastating other reefs as well.

“When coral gets stressed, in most cases because of warm water, it expels the algae,” he explains. Algae have a symbiotic relationship with the coral polyps. The coral provides a protective environment for the algae, which provide corals with essential nutrients and their incredible colors. “So,” Rocha adds, “when the algae gets out, the coral gets bleached and becomes white.” That bleaching can lead to the coral’s death.

Restoring the reef

Various methods have been tried to bring back reefs. The most successful so far has been artificially accelerating a natural process called fragmentation. Researchers purposefully break off coral branches, allow the pieces to recover and grow, and then plant them back onto the reef.

But Shepherd points to a long-term problem with that approach. “You are producing thousands of identical genetic clones of the same coral from one parent colony. So, you’re really reducing the genetic diversity that’s out there on the reef and the ability of the coral to respond, perhaps, to things we don’t even know are going to happen.”

So, the Hope for Reefs crew turned to a unique method pioneered by the coral conservation group Secore International.  In 2011, it began using in vitro fertilization to restore the health of dying coral reefs. Endangered elkhorn coral off the coast of its field station in Curaçao was the test case. Shepherd says, “So, we actually have proven that you can go and collect gametes – sperm and eggs, fertilize them and grow them in a laboratory for a short period of time, plant that baby coral back out on the reefs and, within five years, it will grow up and spawn with its wild counterparts on the reef.”

A small window of opportunity

Corals only spawn once a year, at night around a full moon. During those couple of nights, millions of the corals’ sex cells float to the surface, but, Shepherd explains, more than 99 percent don’t make it.

“What we’re able to do is intercede at a point where most of the sperm and eggs will be eaten by fish. We put a net over the coral and we collect those sperm and eggs, bring them back to the lab, cross-fertilize them and go from there.”

Hope for Reefs doesn’t stop with restoration. Shepherd says educating local governments and community stakeholders to save their coral reefs is key to the success of the project — and time is crucial.

 

“We need communities that want to help manage their reefs, that are going to look at the environmental conditions and why they are the way they are and what we can do to improve them. Reducing sewage outflow, reducing sedimentation, reducing the fishing pressures on herbivores, and there’s a holistic approach to managing reefs that really needs to be in place in order for this to work.”   

And, says project co-director Luiz Rocha, that approach includes communication. “We don’t safeguard our results. We know that it is urgent. We know that we have to talk about it as soon as possible. So, we are working on our scientific publications that take quite a while to be published, but we also take to the field with us a media person, a science writer, a photographer that will be talking about our results in real time, most of the time.”

Looking ahead

Hope for Reefs has just finished the first year of its five-year project and everyone involved is optimistic.  The challenge is to scale up in vitro fertilization to restore endangered coral reefs worldwide before they are lost. The project hopes to seed one million global corals by 2021.

With a commitment of nearly $13-million from the California Academy of Sciences, and a new partnership with The Nature Conservancy, twenty new expeditions are planned. First up, the degraded reef at Secore International’s field station in Curaçao and, then, on to the Yucatan Peninsula and the Great Maya Reef.