Securing petrochemical plants and keeping chemicals out of the hands of terrorists were the topics of discussion at a recent Chemical Sector Security Summit in Houston, Texas. Security experts say the countries that are producing chemicals are shifting and that is one of many reasons developed and developing nations need to share best security practices. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Houston, a petrochemical hub in the United States.
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Month: July 2017
Shik Shik’s Storefront Art Draws In Customers in Mogadishu
A collection of yawing mouths and extracted teeth, booming stereo speakers and colorful hookah pipes adorn shop fronts in Somalia, a colorful contrast to the airbrushed artworks of big business.
Somali mural artist Muawiye Hussein Sidow, also known as “Shik Shik,” is the man responsible for the art that features on more than 100 shops, including barbers, tea shops and supermarkets across Mogadishu.
Sidow’s work has a hand-drawn simplicity, usually involving bright, eye-catching colors. Some pieces stretch over several meters.
Sidow’s father was a commercial artist, who passed his knowledge and skills on to his son.
Sidow, 31, took on his father’s business in 1998 and his painting supports not only his own family, but helps sustain his dad as well as many others.
“I make the pictures to get daily food for my wife and three kids,” he told Reuters. “I also give daily food to [my] retired old father. Now I have become an art teacher there are many artists whom I taught how to make pictures, and they also get their daily food.”
Sidow said he never duplicated murals and that inspiration came from Somali daily life.
Aside from feeding his family and brightening up the urban landscape, Sidow still has ambitions to do more with his art.
“God willing, I hope I will also make pictures in the neighboring countries.”
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From Art to Aliens – Austrian Bodypainting Festival has Colorful Characters
Models endured waits of up to six hours in their quest to become elaborate human canvases in an Austrian town this weekend, as the 2017 World Bodypainting Festival and world championships got under way.
The event sees participants decorated not just in paint, but in elaborate latex makeup, creating appearances that would not be out of place in a science fiction film.
On Friday, some of the human exhibits included a scaly-skinned woman with an animal skeleton headdress, another with multiple sets of horns, while the more reserved were semi-naked, painted with butterflies, apes and flowers.
“My painting is called ‘Utopia’ and stands for a world in which all dreams come true,” said artist and third-time participant Karen Dinger from Germany.
Her painting and costume, which took six hours to create, features heart-shaped red and white wings that stretch from the model’s head to knee-level and a painted moon on the leg.
The three-day festival, which is in its 19th year, sees 60 artists from over 50 countries take part, and competitions in 13 separate categories including special effects bodypainting, brush and sponge painting and ultraviolet effects.
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Institute Wants to Create Transplant Organs for Injured Vets
A bioresearch and manufacturing institute that hopes to develop transplant tissues and organs for injured American soldiers and other patients has opened in New Hampshire.
The Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, which opened Friday in Manchester, will be led by Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway personal transporter, an all-terrain electric wheelchair and several other devices. The University of New Hampshire and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will be part of the institute.
Kamen, speaking after an opening ceremony, said he was optimistic the institute could develop artificial skin, bones and nerves and eventually organs that could be implanted into patients in the next few years. He said it would start with developing the technology allowing for the production of pieces of organs and “way down the road” producing livers, kidneys and lungs. He said one of the challenges is figuring out which organs would be easiest to reproduce.
Kamen said the goal was to scale up the developments in regenerative medicine by forming this public-private partnership, which brings together 26 universities and medical centers, 80 private companies and nearly $300 million in government and private-sector funding.
“What we are saying is that there are all sorts of miracles that already exist in roller bottles and petri dishes at medical schools, labs,” Kamen said, comparing their effort to what Campbell’s Soup Co. has done with the production of soup. “We said, ‘Let’s go out to the biggest, best companies that do automation, controls, sensors, and that understand process, that understand high-level manufacturing, and let’s bring them to the same place as all the people who have the magic in their roller bottles.’ ”
The state’s Democratic congressional delegation and Republican Governor Chris Sununu welcomed the project, saying it would bring good jobs to Manchester and give the state’s college graduates opportunities to work on cutting-edge biomedical research.
“It is an exciting day for Manchester and New Hampshire, and, as Dean said, for our war fighters and the country,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen said, recalling a 2006 event she attended at Harvard University, where Kamen talked of one day being able to produce organs and replace a lost kidney.
Sununu called the opening “awesome” and said it was another sign the state’s business climate is on the upswing.
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Hackers Scour Voting Machines for Election Bugs
Hackers attending this weekend’s Def Con hacking convention in Las Vegas were invited to break into voting machines and voter databases in a bid to uncover vulnerabilities that could be exploited to sway election results.
The 25-year-old conference’s first “hacker voting village” opened on Friday as part of an effort to raise awareness about the threat of election results being altered through hacking.
Hackers crammed into a crowded conference room for the rare opportunity to examine and attempt to hack some 30 pieces of election equipment, much of it purchased over eBay, including some voting machines and digital voter registries that are currently in use.
Showdown between hackers
“We encourage you to do stuff that if you did on election day they would probably arrest you,” said Johns Hopkins computer scientist Matt Blaze, who organized the segment in a conference room at the Caesar’s Palace convention center.
The exercise featured a “cyber range” simulator where blue teams were tasked with defending a mock local election system from red team hackers.
Concerns about election hacking have surged since U.S. intelligence agencies claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of Democratic Party emails to help Republican Donald Trump win the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Russians targeted 21 state elections
A Department of Homeland Security official told Congress in June that Russian hackers had targeted 21 U.S. state election systems in the 2016 presidential race and a small number were breached, but there was no evidence that any votes had been manipulated.
Russia has denied the accusations.
Jake Braun, another organizer, said he believed the hacker voting village would convince participants that hacking could be used to sway an election.
“There’s been a lot of claims that our election system is unhackable. That’s BS,” said Braun. “Only a fool or liar would try to claim that their database or machine was unhackable.”
Call for paper ballots
Barbara Simons, president of advocacy group Verified Voting, said she expects Russia to try to influence the U.S. 2018 midterm election and 2020 elections. To counter such threats, she called for requiring use of paper ballots and mandatory auditing computers to count them.
More than 20,000 people were expected to attend the three-day Def Con convention.
The hacker voting village was one of about a dozen interactive areas where participants could study and practice hacking in fields such as automobiles, cryptology and healthcare.
your ads here!Honolulu Targets ‘Smartphone Zombies’ With Crosswalk Ban
A ban on pedestrians looking at mobile phones or texting while crossing the street will take effect in Hawaii’s largest city in late October, as Honolulu becomes the first major U.S. city to pass legislation aimed at reducing injuries and deaths from “distracted walking.”
The ban comes as cities around the world grapple with how to protect “smartphone zombies” from injuring themselves by stepping into traffic or running into stationary objects.
Starting October 25, a Honolulu pedestrian can be fined between $15 and $99, depending on the number of times police catch him looking at a phone or tablet device as he crosses a street, Mayor Kirk Caldwell told reporters gathered near one of the city’s busiest downtown intersections Thursday.
“We hold the unfortunate distinction of being a major city with more pedestrians being hit in crosswalks, particularly our seniors, than almost any other city in the county,” Caldwell said. Honolulu data on distracted-walking incidents were not immediately available.
Caldwell signed the legislation Thursday after it was passed in a 7-2 vote by the City Council earlier this month, city records show.
People making calls for emergency services are exempt from the ban.
Injury toll
More than 11,000 injuries resulted from phone-related distraction while walking in the United States between 2000 and 2011, according to a University of Maryland study published in 2015.
The findings pushed the nonprofit National Safety Council to add “distracted walking” to its annual compilation of the biggest risks for unintentional injuries and deaths in the United States, highlighting the severity of the issue.
“Cellphones are not just pervading our roadways but pervading our sidewalks, too,” Maureen Vogel, a spokeswoman for the council, said in a phone interview on Friday.
Efforts to save pedestrians from their phones extend beyond America’s shores. London has experimented with padding lamp posts to soften the blow for distracted walkers, according to the Independent newspaper.
In Germany, the city of Augsburg last year embedded traffic signals into the ground near tram tracks to help downward-fixated pedestrians avoid injury, local media reported.
Opponents of the Honolulu law argued it infringes on personal freedom and amounts to government overreach.
“Scrap this intrusive bill, provide more education to citizens about responsible electronics usage, and allow law enforcement to focus on larger issues,” resident Ben Robinson told the City Council in written testimony.
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US Government Proposes Cutting Nicotine Levels in Cigarettes
The U.S. government is proposing cutting the nicotine level in cigarettes for the first time in its history.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday it has directed the agency’s staff to develop new regulations to make cigarettes less addictive. Tobacco stocks fell Friday following the news.
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the agency plans to explore ways to limit the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.
“A renewed focus on nicotine can help us to achieve a world where cigarettes no longer addict future generations of our kids,” Gottlieb said in a speech to staff in Silver Spring, Maryland.
E-Cigarettes
Along with reducing nicotine, the FDA plans to ease the path of entry for less-harmful nicotine delivery systems, such as e-cigarettes. The agency said it will give e-cigarette makers four more years to comply with FDA oversight of their products, giving them more time on the market without regulation.
“While there’s still much research to be done on these products and the risks that they may pose, they may also present benefits that we must consider,” Gottlieb said.
E-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is addictive, but they do not contain tar or many of the other substances in traditional cigarettes, which make them deadly. Battery-powered e-cigarettes turn liquid nicotine into an inhalable vapor.
“Nicotine itself is not responsible for the cancer, the lung disease and heart disease that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans each year,” Gottlieb said. “It’s the other chemical compounds in tobacco and in the smoke created by setting tobacco on fire that directly cause illness and death.”
However, Gottlieb said he was concerned that e-cigarette makers are using “kid-appealing flavors” which he said the FDA would consider regulating.
“I have real concerns about kids use of e-cigarettes and I know many others share those concerns, especially for those products marketed with obviously kid-appealing flavors,” he said.
Response
Anti-smoking activists hailed the announcement and said that reducing the level of nicotine in traditional cigarettes could make it easier for people to switch to e-cigarettes or less harmful tobacco products.
However, some activists say the amount of nicotine in cigarettes needs to be reduced dramatically, and say if nicotine is only reduced a small amount it will just encourage smokers to use more cigarettes.
Altria Group, which sells Marlboro and other cigarettes in the United States, said it would comply with all FDA rules, but said in a statement Friday that any new rules should be based on evidence and not lead to unintended consequences.
While the new policies could be bad business for cigarette companies, Altria and other groups, like Philip Morris International, have been spending billions of dollars to make to products that they say have less health risks such as e-cigarettes.
The FDA has had the power to regulate nicotine levels since 2009 but has not yet done so.
The U.S. government says tobacco use causes more than 480,000 deaths annually, and is the leading cause of preventable heart disease.
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Roomba Vacuum Maker iRobot Betting Big on ‘Smart’ Home
The Roomba robotic vacuum has been whizzing across floors for years, but its future may lie more in collecting data than dirt.
That data is of the spatial variety: the dimensions of a room as well as distances between sofas, tables, lamps and other home furnishings. To a tech industry eager to push “smart” homes controlled by a variety of Internet-enabled devices, that space is the next frontier.
Smart home lighting, thermostats and security cameras are already on the market, but Colin Angle, chief executive of Roomba maker iRobot Corp., says they are still dumb when it comes to understanding their physical environment. He thinks the mapping technology currently guiding top-end Roomba models could change that and is basing the company’s strategy on it.
“There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared,” said Angle.
That vision has its fans, from investors to the likes of Amazon.com, Apple and Alphabet, who are all pushing artificially intelligent voice assistants as smart home interfaces. According to financial research firm IHS Markit, the market for smart home devices was worth $9.8 billion in 2016 and is projected to grow 60 percent this year.
Map sharing
Angle told Reuters that iRobot, which made Roomba compatible with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in March, could reach a deal to share its maps for free with customer consent to one or more of the Big Three in the next couple of years. Angle added the company could extract value from those agreements by connecting for free with as many companies as possible to make the device more useful in the home.
Amazon declined to comment, and Apple and Google did not respond to requests for comment.
So far investors have cheered Angle’s plans, sending iRobot stock soaring to $102 in mid-June from $35 a year ago, giving it a market value of nearly $2.5 billion on 2016 revenue of $660 million.
But there are headwinds for iRobot’s approach, ranging from privacy concerns to a rising group of mostly cheaper competitors — such as the $300 Bissell SmartClean and the $270 Hoover Quest 600 — which are threatening to turn a once-futuristic product into a commoditized home appliance.
Low-cost Roomba rivals were the subject of a report by short-seller Ben Axler of Spruce Point Capital Management, which sent the stock down 20 percent to $84 at the end of June.
The company’s smart home vision has helped bring around some former critics. Willem Mesdag, managing partner of hedge fund Red Mountain Capital — who led an unsuccessful proxy fight against Angle last year and wound up selling his iRobot shares — is now largely supportive of the company’s direction.
“I think they have a tremendous first-mover advantage,” said Mesdag, who thinks iRobot would be a great acquisition for one of the Big Three. “The competition is focused on making cleaning products, not a mapping robot.”
Military beginnings
Founded in 1990, iRobot saw early success building bomb disposal robots for the U.S. Army before launching the world’s first “robovac” in 2002. The company sold off its military unit last year to focus on the consumer sector, and says the Roomba — which ranges in price from $375 to $899 — still has 88 percent of the U.S. robovac market.
All robovacs use short-range infrared or laser sensors to detect and avoid obstacles, but iRobot in 2015 added a camera, new sensors and software to its flagship 900-series Roomba that gave it the ability to build a map while keeping track of its own location within that map.
So-called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology right now enables Roomba, and other higher-end robovacs made by Dyson and other rivals, to do things like stop vacuuming, head back to its dock to recharge and then return to the same spot to finish the job.
Guy Hoffman, a robotics professor at Cornell University, said detailed spatial mapping technology would be a “major breakthrough” for the smart home.
Right now, smart home devices operate “like a tourist in New York who never leaves the subway,” said Hoffman. “There is some information about the city, but the tourist is missing a lot of context for what’s happening outside of the stations.”
With regularly updated maps, Hoffman said, sound systems could match home acoustics, air conditioners could schedule airflow by room, and smart lighting could adjust according to the position of windows and time of day.
Companies like Amazon, Google and Apple could also use the data to recommend home goods for customers to buy, said Hoffman.
Privacy concerns
One potential downside is that sharing data about users’ homes raises clear privacy issues, said Ben Rose, an analyst who covers iRobot for Battle Road Research. Customers could find it “sort of a scary thing,” he said.
Angle said iRobot would not be sharing data without its customers’ permission, but he expressed confidence most would give their consent in order to access the smart home functions.
Another Roomba risk is that cheaper cleaning products are what consumers really want. In May, The New York Times’ Sweethome blog dethroned the $375 Roomba 690 as its most-recommended robovac in favor of the $220 Eufy RoboVac 11, saying the connectivity and other advanced features of the former would not justify the greater cost for most users.
Short-seller Axler’s June report caused a stir mostly with its prediction that value-priced appliance maker SharkNinja Operating LLC could launch a robovac by year’s end. SharkNinja declined to comment.
One potential iRobot bulwark against these new competitors: a portfolio of 1,000 patents worldwide covering the very concept of a self-navigating household robot vacuum as well as basic technologies like object avoidance.
A handful of those patents are now being tested in a series of patent infringement lawsuits iRobot filed in April against Bissell, Stanley Black & Decker, Hoover Inc., Chinese outsourced manufacturers and other robovac makers. The litigation is the most significant in iRobot’s history.
A lawyer for Hoover declined to comment. Lawyers for Bissell and Stanley Black & Decker did not respond to requests for comment.
The patents are a “huge part of our competitive moat,” Angle said. “It is getting really hard not to step on our intellectual property.”
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Three-man Crew Reaches Space Station as US Boosts Research
A new crew arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, giving NASA for the first time four astronauts to boost U.S. research projects aboard the orbiting laboratory.
A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying three spaceflight veterans slipped into a docking port aboard the station at 5:54 p.m. EDT (2154 GMT) as the $100 billion research outpost sailed about 250 miles (400 kilometers) over Germany, a NASA TV broadcast showed.
Strapped inside the capsule, which blasted off aboard a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan six hours earlier, were Randy Bresnik, with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Sergey Ryazanskiy, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos; and Italy’s Paolo Nespoli, with the European Space Agency.
The men will join two NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut already aboard the station, a project of 15 nations.
Their arrival means the U.S. space agency now has four crew members instead of three available for medical experiments, technology demonstrations and other research aboard the station, the U.S. space agency said.
The extra astronaut will effectively double the amount of time for research, program manager Kirk Shireman said at a station conference last week.
NASA does not oversee the Russian staff, which was reduced to two in April until a long-delayed research module joins the station next year.
Previously, Russia flew three cosmonauts, with the remaining three positions filled by a combination of European, Japanese, Canadian and U.S. astronauts, who are trained and overseen by NASA.
Space taxis
By the end of next year, NASA intends to begin flying astronauts aboard space taxis under development by SpaceX and Boeing. Both spaceships have room for a fourth seat, bumping the station’s overall crew size to seven once Russia returns to full staffing.
NASA is using the station to prepare for human missions to the moon and Mars and to stimulate commercial space transportation, pharmaceutical research, manufacturing and other businesses.
The agency also conducts physics, astronomy and Earth science investigations aboard the outpost, which has been staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts since 2000.
Bresnik, 49, last flew on the space shuttle in 2009 during a space station assembly mission. Ryazanskiy, 42, spent 5½ months aboard the station in 2013-14. Nespoli, 60, is making his third space flight, having previously served on both space shuttle and space station crews.
The men are slated to return to Earth in December.
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Nepal Woodcarvers Inspired to Restore Quake-toppled Temples
In the rubble of Nepal’s 2015 earthquake, a team of dedicated woodworkers is finding inspiration to re-create what was lost.
The centuries-old Char Narayan and Hari Shankara temples were destroyed by the massive April 2015 earthquake that shook the Himalayan nation, killing nearly 9,000 people. The temples were the jewel of Patan Durbar Square, which is thronged by thousands of tourists and local visitors every day. The structures were crumpled by the force of the tremor, and the carved doors, roof and brick structure lie in ruins.
A team of dedicated woodworkers is now trying to restore Nepal’s heritage. They have been working six days a week, for nearly two years, repairing the beautifully hand-carved wooden doors and windows.
The broken wooden beams are being replaced by new ones, but the workers are trying to use the salvaged portions as much as possible.
The “Silpakars” — as woodworkers from the Newar ethnic community are known — have passed down their craft and skills for generations.
“I am proud to continue my ancestral trade and help restore a big part of Nepal’s history that was destroyed by the earthquake,” said Shyam Krishna, chiseling away the wood pieces.
He and his fellow workers are paid only about $15 a day each, which is much less than they would earn as building furnishers.
“It is not about the money. We might make less money, but this is a moment of pride for us to be able to restore the heritage of our country,” he said.
Already two years at work, they will likely need another year to just get the windows, doors and beams ready.
Nepal faces criticism from the international community for slow progress in reconstruction work despite a $4.1 billion international pledge.
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Campaign Underway to Stem Polio Outbreak in Syria’s Deir Ezzor
A United Nations-led polio immunization campaign to stem an outbreak of this crippling disease is under way in Syria’s Deir Ezzor Governorate. The campaign, headed by the World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund, started on July 22.
The campaign got off to a good start. The World Health Organization reports that hundreds of vaccinators going door to door in this embattled Syrian city managed to inoculate nearly 60,000 children under the age of five on the first day. Security problems had delayed the start of the campaign in Deir Ezzor and continue to pose dangers for the health workers.
WHO reports 89 cases of acute flaccid paralysis, which is mainly caused by a wild polio virus, have been detected this year in Deir Ezzor. It also reports another 26 cases of vaccine-derived polio type 2 cases in the area.
The agency says one case of vaccine-derived polio has been discovered in Tell Abyad district in Raqqa along with 14 cases of acute flaccid paralysis in the whole region.
WHO spokesman Tariq Jasarevic said the campaign aims to vaccinate 328,000 children in Deir Ezzor and 120,000 children in Raqqa, when a planned vaccination campaign in that governorate gets under way.
“Hopefully, we will be able to stop this outbreak because even though the vaccine-derived polio is in a way less virulent than the wild polio, it is paralyzing children and it also reflects that there is a low level of immunization,” he said.
WHO reports 355 vaccination teams from local non-governmental organizations are immunizing children at fixed sites or going door to door to make sure no child is missed. Jasarevic said the community acceptance is high.
He said two immunization rounds are planned for Deir Ezzor, although no date for the second round has been set. He said polio vaccines for two rounds have been shipped to Qamishli, in preparation for the planned campaign in Raqqa; however, the raging battle to retake Raqqa — Islamic State’s de facto capital — from the militants puts the starting date of the polio immunization campaign in the outskirts of the city in question.
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National Parks Traveler Celebrates One Year Milestone
In June of 2016, Mikah Meyer set out on an ambitious journey — to visit all 417 national park sites in America. He estimates it will take him three years to complete his non-stop journey. One-third of the way through his adventure, he shared highlights – and lowlights – with VOA’s Julie Taboh.
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Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood Buy Wedding Gifts for Fans
Married country stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood are sharing the love by handing out wedding gifts to fans.
Jude and Jamie Blanchard attended Brooks’ show in Lafayette, Louisiana, last month with a sign that read: “Best Week Ever. Garth this Friday, our wedding next Friday.” Brooks took notice and serenaded them with “To Make You Feel My Love.” He also asked if they wanted anything off their wedding registry, and Jamie passed along a wedding invitation to the stage.
The Lafayette Daily Advertiser reports a pair of lounge chairs, a KitchenAid mixer and other items from the stars showed up at the Blanchards’ door.
This month, Brooks and Yearwood offered to pay for a Hawaiian honeymoon for a couple who got engaged at an Oklahoma City show.
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Japan Imposes Stiff Tariffs on Imported US Frozen Beef
Japan says tariffs on U.S. imports of frozen beef will rise to 50 percent next month, from the current 38.5 percent.
“The tariff will take effect automatically as the volume of the imported U.S. frozen beef exceeded the quota set by law,” Finance Minister Taro Aso said Friday.
Under World Trade Organization rules, Japan can impose safeguard tariffs when imports rise more than 17 percent, year-on-year in any given quarter.
Japan, known for its world-famous Kobe beef, prized by chefs around the world for its tenderness, flavor and marbled fat, uses tariffs and other measures to protect its farmers from competition.
Peter Seng, chief executive of the U.S. Meat Export Federation, said in a statement the 50 percent tariff has implications for U.S. beef exports that are “significant.”
Australia, however, which exports almost as much beef to Japan as the U.S., is not facing the emergency tariffs because it has a free trade agreement with Japan as part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the TPP trade agreement shortly after taking office.
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Speech Patterns Could Be a Sign of Dementia
An estimated 47 million people around the world have dementia, a decline in memory or other thinking skills severe enough to interfere with daily life. The most common form of the condition is Alzheimer’s disease. Now, research shows the way you speak may indicate whether you are at risk of developing dementia. A new study says pauses and filler words may be a sign of early mild cognitive impairment, and that could help doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s much quicker. VOA’s Deborah Block reports.
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Optimizing Efficiency of Hybrid Cars
Trying to curb increasingly serious air pollution in their cities, authorities in France, followed this week by those in Britain, announced they will ban the sale of new gas and diesel-powered cars by 2040. This may speed up sales of hybrid electric vehicles. In the meantime, engineers are working hard to make such cars more attractive. Researchers at the University of California say their mileage could be improved with smarter onboard computers. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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LOL to Heart Eyes: New Emojis Must Pass Muster
Cheery Hi-5, a snobbish Poop and a conflicted Meh have starring roles in the animated The Emoji Movie, which imagines a world inside cellphones where emojis rebel against portraying just one emotion all their lives.
Yet the dozen or so people who select and release the tiny, ubiquitous characters globally are far removed from the glitz of Hollywood, where the Sony Pictures movie, which begins its global rollout Friday, was developed.
The humans who toil in obscurity to shape and approve new emojis are part of the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley-based group of computer and software corporations and individual volunteers with backgrounds in technology, encoding and linguistics.
2,600-plus emojis
From smiley faces to thumbs up, there are now more than 2,600 emojis worldwide and, according to a July Facebook report, more than 60 million a day are sent on the No. 1 social media network alone.
The consortium approves about 50-100 new emojis every year, not counting the different skin tones for people emoji, after a rigorous application and review process, said Mark Davis, president and co-founder of the group.
The latest batch, released in June and reaching phones and other devices in coming months, include a star-struck emoji, an exploding head, a group of wizards, mermaids and a woman wearing a hijab.
Submissions from everywhere
“We get submissions from all over the world,” Davis said in an interview. “The hijab emoji came from a Saudi Arabian young woman who is living in Germany who made a very compelling proposal. I’m looking forward to the exploding head — I think that’s going to be very popular.
“People need to make a case as to why they think their emoji is going to be frequently used, how it breaks new ground, how it is different from other emojis that have already been encoded.”
Logos, brands and emojis tied to specific companies are not accepted. “We also don’t accept specific people. We did encode a cowboy but we wouldn’t encode John Wayne,” Davis said.
Some concepts just do not translate as emoji.
LOL emoji most popular
“Anything that needs a lot of detail to explain or understand is trouble. It’s also hard to make an emoji for something abstract — like good governance, or a responsible president,” Davis said.
Davis said there are 2,666 emojis worldwide. The LOL emoji with tears of laughter is the most popular, according to a July Facebook survey of its 2 billion monthly users, followed by the heart eyes emoji. Italians and Spaniards favor the kissing emoji.
The consortium played no part in the making of The Emoji Movie, Davis said, because all of its work is open-source, available to all, and no permission was needed.
Nevertheless, he never imagined that the computer-generated punctuation marks that originated in Japan in the 1980s would become Hollywood stars.
“That’s something that never really crossed our minds,” Davis said.
your ads here!AIDS Burdens Zimbabwe’s Elderly With Orphans, Illness
Jabulani Zilawe lost all 11 of his children to AIDS. Now he is the only one left to care for their orphans.
“This has become my life — with my grandchildren. All their parents died. AIDS killed them. I had 11 children, six of them were girls who had moved to South Africa to seek better life, but they all came back dead — one after the other,” Zilawe told the Thompson Reuters Foundation as he surveyed his small grandchildren scrambling around him.
Zilawe lives in a dilapidated homestead outside Norton, a town 40 kilometers from Harare, the Zimbabwean capital.
His bedroom is a thatched mud hut that sits near 12 mounds marking the remains of his wife and children.
“My sons, who became illegal gold miners, also suffered from AIDS before they died. You can see the graves here; the additional one belongs to my wife, who also died some two years ago, leaving me to look after our orphaned grandchildren,” said Zilawe, 76.
Nearby, some of his grandchildren wrestled over a pot of leftover porridge. None is in school; instead, like their grandfather, each child passes the day at the homestead, idling and seeking a spot to bask in the sunshine.
Some of the little ones fall ill — regularly, said Zilawe, who didn’t know whether any carried the virus that had killed their parents.
“I don’t know anything about my grandchildren’s HIV status; maybe they have the disease or maybe not,” he said.
Ailing caregivers
His life is tough. Yet many other Zimbabweans in Zilawe’s age bracket are not just caregivers but are also coping with AIDS diagnoses of their own.
“It’s sad. It’s worrying when you look at the rate of HIV/AIDS amongst aged persons here. The percentage of elderly persons aged 60 years and above living with HIV is around 15.3 percent,” said Marck Chikanza, national coordinator of the National Age Network of Zimbabwe (NANZ), an organization that caters to older people’s needs.
NANZ said more than 115,000 older people are living with HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwe, one in 10 of the 1.2 million Zimbaweans who the United Nations says are living with HIV/AIDS.
“There has been a decline in the rate of people living with HIV across all age groups except in the 50+ age group, where there has been a rise from 13.8 percent to around 14.3 percent,” said Tadiwa Pfupa-Nyatanga of the NAC organization, which coordinates the government’s response to HIV/AIDS.
According to 2016 official statistics, about 185,000 AIDS-orphaned Zimbabwean children are living under the guardianship of their grandparents — people like Zilawe, who struggle to cope.
“Most aged persons here hardly have the capacity to produce or buy food on their own. And most of the orphaned kids they look after are far too young to be working to produce food for their families. And the burden, at the end of the day, rests with the grandparents — who, in a true sense, are also dependents,” Anatalia Mabeza, who chairs an HIV/AIDS support group in Norton, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation..
Some orphaned children say their grandparents offer little or no medical help for the health problems they inherited.
“I was openly told by my mother before she died that I was born with the HIV/AIDS condition, but now as I live with my grandmother, who is in her 60s, she has never bothered to monitor my condition,” said Lillian Muranda, 14, who lives in Caledonia informal settlement, 25 kilometers east of Harare.
‘I was bewitched’
“She tells me I was bewitched, but I’m always ill and absent from school most of the time,” Muranda told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
As Muranda delved deeper into the bewitching story, her grandmother, Agnes Muranda, stepped in sharply to intervene: “Why do you bother her? You newsmen are very bad. You want to rule out witchcraft from my granddaughter’s illness. Leave us.”
Superstitious beliefs like this hinder government efforts to combat AIDS, and even if a grandparent has good information and plenty of intent, it doesn’t mean that help will follow.
“We have no means to support our AIDS-orphaned grandchildren besides the treatment drugs they receive from government health care centers. What we can only do is to make sure they take their medication. Remember, we are also victims of a failing economy and there are also many amongst aged persons who are living with HIV,” said Jonathan Mandaza, who chairs the Zimbabwe Older Persons’ Organization.
As Zilawe sees it, he is shunned as an aging irrelevance yet is left to pick up the pieces of his children’s lost lives.
“As older persons, we are not consulted on HIV and AIDS issues, yet there is also a strong misconception that sex matters don’t concern us. As such, access points for condoms and other HIV/AIDS services only favor younger people, leaving us out,” said Zilawe.
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More Cyber Attacks, More Job Security for Hackers
The surge in far-flung and destructive cyber attacks is not good for national security, but for an increasing number of hackers and researchers, it is great for job security.
The new reality is on display in Las Vegas this week at the annual Black Hat and Def Con security conferences, which now have a booming side business in recruiting.
“Hosting big parties has enabled us to meet more talent in the community, helping fill key positions and also retain great people,” said Jen Ellis, a vice president with cybersecurity firm Rapid7 Inc., which filled the hip Hakkasan nightclub Wednesday at one of the week’s most popular parties.
More tech, more jobs
Twenty or even 10 years ago, career options for technology tinkerers were mostly limited to security firms, handfuls of jobs inside mainstream companies, and in government agencies.
But as tech has taken over the world, the opportunities in the security field have exploded.
Whole industries that used to have little to do with technology now need protection, including automobiles, medical devices and the ever-expanding Internet of Things, from thermostats and fish tanks to home security devices.
More insurance companies now cover breaches, with premiums reduced for strong security practices. And lawyers are making sure that cloud providers are held responsible if a customer’s data is stolen from them and otherwise pushing to hold tech companies liable for problems, meaning they need security experts too.
1.8 million skilled workers needed
The nonprofit Center for Cyber Safety and Education last month predicted a global shortage of 1.8 million skilled security workers in 2022. The group, which credentials security professionals, said that a third of hiring managers plan to boost their security teams by at least 15 percent.
For hackers who prefer to pick things apart rather than stand guard over them, an enormous number of companies now offer “bug bounties,” or formal rewards, for warnings about vulnerabilities that leave them exposed to criminals or spies.
New ways to make money
One of the outside firms that handle such programs, HackerOne, said it has paid out $18.8 million since 2014 to fix 50,140 bugs, with about half of that work done in the past year.
Mark Litchfield made it into the firm’s “Hacker Hall of Fame” last year by being the first to pull in more than $500,000 in bounties through the platform, well more than he earned at his last full-time security job, at consulting firm NCC Group.
In the old days, “The only payout was publicity, free press,” Litchfield said. “That was the payoff then. The payoff now is literally to be paid in dollars.”
There are other emerging ways to make money too. Justine Bone’s medical hacking firm, MedSec, took the unprecedented step last year of openly teaming with an investor who was selling shares short, betting that they would lose value.
It was acrimonious, but St Jude Medical ultimately fixed its pacemaker monitors, which could have been hacked, and Bone predicted others will try the same path.
“Us cyber security nerds have spent most of our careers trying to make the world a better place by engaging with companies, finding bugs which companies may or may not repair,” Bone said.
“If we can take our expertise out to customers, media, regulators, nonprofits and think tanks and out to the financial sector, the investors and analysts, we start to help companies understand in terms of their external environment.”
Chris Wysopal, co-founder of code auditor Veracode, bought in April by CA Technologies, said that he was initially skeptical of the MedSec approach but came around to it, in part because it worked. He appeared at Black Hat with Bone.
“Many have written that the software and hardware market is dysfunctional, a lemon market, because buyers don’t know how insecure the products they purchase are,” Wysopal said in an interview. “I’d like to see someone fixing this broken market. Profiting off of that fix seems like the best approach for a capitalism-based economy.”
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New Surgical Glue Inspired by Slug Slime
Scientists have developed an experimental surgical glue inspired by the mucus secreted by slugs that could offer an alternative to sutures and staples for closing wounds.
While some medical glues already exist, they often adhere weakly, are not particularly flexible and frequently cannot be used in very wet conditions.
To get around those problems, a group of scientists from Harvard and other research centers decided to learn from slugs, which — as well as making slime to glide on — can produce extremely adhesive mucus as a defense mechanism.
The slugs’ trick is to generate a substance that not only forms strong bonds on wet surfaces but also has a matrix that dissipates energy at the point of adhesion, making it highly flexible.
Strong, nontoxic
The man-made version of this tough adhesive is based on the same principles and in a series of experiments reported in the journal Science on Thursday it was shown to adhere strongly to pig skin, cartilage, tissue and organs. It also proved nontoxic to human cells.
In one test, the new glue was used to close a wound in a blood-covered pig’s heart and successfully maintained a leak-free seal after the heart was inflated and deflated tens of thousands of times.
In another case it was applied to a laceration in a rat’s liver and performed just as well as a hemostat, a surgical tool often used in operations to control bleeding.
“There are a variety of potential uses and in some settings this could replace sutures and staples, which can cause damage and be difficult to place in certain situations,” said researcher David Mooney, professor of bioengineering at Harvard.
Mussel-inspired glue
Mooney and colleagues envisage the new adhesive will be made in sheets and cut to size, although they have also developed an injected version for closing deep wounds. The injection would be hardened using ultraviolet light, like dental fillings.
It is not the first time that scientists have taken inspiration from nature to devise a better medical adhesive.
Four years ago, another research group developed a glue inspired by the underwater sticking properties of mussels, but Mooney thinks slugs win hands-down in terms of stickiness and flexibility.
The scientists are applying for patents, although it will require a commercial company to then license the technology and take it into the next phase of human clinical trials.
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Warming to Worsen Dead Zones, Algae Blooms Choking US Waterways
Projected increases in rain from global warming could further choke U.S. waterways with fertilizer runoff that trigger dead zones and massive algae blooms, a new study said.
If greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, more and heavier rain will increase nitrogen flowing into lakes, rivers and bays by about 19 percent by the end of the century, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science.
While that may not sound like much, many coastal areas are already heavily loaded with nitrogen. Researchers calculated that an extra 860,000 tons of nitrogen yearly will wash into American waterways by century’s end.
The nutrients create low-oxygen dead zones and harmful blooms of algae in the Gulf of Mexico, Great Lakes, Pacific Northwest and Atlantic coast.
“Many of these coastal areas are already suffering year-in, year-out from these dead zones and algal blooms,” said one of the researchers, Anna Michalak, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. “And climate change will make it all worse.”
When waterways are overloaded with nutrients, algae growth can run amok, creating dead zones. Algae can also choke waterways with “green mats of goop on top of the water” that are giant floating blooms, Michalak said.
The blooms often have toxins that can pollute drinking water. In 2014, a bloom on Lake Erie fouled tap water for half a million people in Toledo, Ohio, for more than two days.
The study, which is based on computer simulations, found the Northeast and Midwest will be hit hardest by the increase in nitrogen runoff. Most of the excess nitrogen from fertilizer use and the burning of coal, oil and gas would flow into the Mississippi River system and into the Gulf of Mexico, one of the largest dead zones on Earth, researchers said.
“The results are incredibly interesting and compelling,” said Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia marine sciences professor who wasn’t part of the team.
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Google Hopes to Train 10M Africans in Online Skills, CEO Says
Alphabet’s Google aims to train 10 million people in Africa in online skills over the next five years in an effort to make them more employable, its chief executive said Thursday.
The U.S. technology giant also hopes to train 100,000 software developers in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, a company spokeswoman said.
Google’s pledge marked an expansion of an initiative it launched in April 2016 to train young Africans in digital skills. It announced in March that it had reached its initial target of training 1 million people.
The company is “committing to prepare another 10 million people for jobs of the future in the next five years,” Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told a company conference in Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos.
Google said it would offer a combination of in-person and online training. Google has said on its blog that it carries out the training in languages including Swahili, Hausa and Zulu and tries to ensure that at least 40 percent of people trained are women. It did not say how much the program cost.
Africa, with its rapid population growth, falling data costs and heavy adoption of mobile phones, having largely leapfrogged personal computer use, is tempting for tech companies.
Executives such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Chairman Jack Ma have also recently toured parts of the continent.
Basic phones, less surfing
But countries like Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, which Google said it would initially target for its mobile developer training, may not offer as much opportunity as the likes of China and India for tech firms.
Yawning wealth gaps mean that much of the population in places like Nigeria has little disposable income, while mobile adoption tends to favor more basic phone models. Combined with bad telecommunications infrastructure, that can mean slower and less internet surfing, which tech firms rely on to make money.
Google also announced plans to provide more than $3 million in equity-free funding, mentorship and working space access to more than 60 African startups over three years.
In addition, YouTube will roll out a new app, YouTube Go, aimed at improving video streaming over slow networks, said Johanna Wright, vice president of YouTube.
YouTube Go is being tested in Nigeria as of June, and the trial version of the app will be offered globally later this year, she said.
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