Solar power is definitely the wave of the future. But in the future instead of a roof covered with solar panels, your own windows might not only be collecting power from the sun, but also helping your house conserve energy. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Two films on our radar this week are Stephen Frears’ heartwarming drama “Victoria & Abdul” and Doug Liman’s “American Made.” Both features offer intelligent, entertaining stories and a superb cast. VOA’s Penelope Poulou takes a look.
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Years of limited oversight and unchecked growth have turned Facebook into a force with incredible power over the lives of its 2 billion users. But the social network has also given rise to unintended social consequences, and they’re starting to catch up with it:
House and Senate panels investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections have invited Facebook, along with Google and Twitter, to testify this fall. Facebook just agreed to give congressional investigators 3,000 political ads purchased by Russian-backed entities, and announced new disclosure policies for political advertising
Facebook belatedly acknowledged its role purveying false news to its users during the 2016 campaign and announced new measures to curb it. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg even apologized, more than 10 months after the fact, for calling the idea that Facebook might have influenced the election “pretty crazy.”
The company has taken flack for a live video feature that was quickly used to broadcast violent crime and suicides; for removing an iconic Vietnam War photo for “child pornography” and then backtracking; and for allegedly putting its thumb on a feature that ranked trending news stories.
Facebook is behind the curve in understanding that “what happens in their system has profound consequences in the real world,” said Fordham University media-studies professor Paul Levinson. The company’s knee-jerk response has often been “none of your business” when confronted about these consequences, he said.
Moving fast, still breaking things
That response may not work much longer for a company whose original but now-abandoned slogan — “move fast and break things” — sometimes still seems to govern it.
Facebook has, so far, enjoyed seemingly unstoppable growth in users, revenue and its stock price. Along the way, it has also pushed new features on to users even when they protested, targeted ads at them based on a plethora of carefully collected personal details, and engaged in behavioral experiments that seek to influence their mood.
“There’s a general arrogance — they know what’s right, they know what’s best, we know how to make better for you so just let us do it,” said Notre Dame business professor Timothy Carone, who added that this is true of Silicon Valley giants in general. “They need to take a step down and acknowledge that they really don’t have all the answers.”
Hands-off Facebook
Facebook generally points to the fact that its policies prohibit misuse of its platform, and that it is difficult to catch everyone who tries to abuse its platform. When pressed, it tends to acknowledge some problems, offer a few narrowly tailored fixesand move on.
But there is a larger question, which is whether Facebook has taken sufficient care to build policies and systems that are resistant to abuse.
Facebook declined to address the subject on the record, although it pointed to earlier public statements in which Zuckerberg described how he wants Facebook to be a force for good in the world. The company also recently launched a blog called “Hard Questions” that attempts to address its governance issues in more depth.
But Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s No. 2 executive, offered an unexpected perspective on this question in a recent apology. Facebook “never intended or anticipated” how people could use its automated advertising to target ads at users who expressed anti-Semitic views. That, she wrote, “is on us. And we did not find it ourselves — and that is also on us.”
As a result, she said the company will tighten its ad policies to ensure such abuses don’t happen again.
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Two films on our radar this week are Stephen Frears’ heartwarming drama Victoria & Abdul about the deep friendship between Queen Victoria and her Indian servant Abdul Karim between 1887 and 1901, and Doug Liman’s American Made about Barry Seal, a 1970s audacious American pilot, who, during the Nicaraguan Crisis worked for the CIA, the DEA and the Colombian cartel.
As different as these two films are, they are both based on true stories, proving yet again that often life is stranger than fiction. Both films feature intelligent plots and superb acting.
WATCH: Victoria & Abdul, American Made Based on Incredible True Stories
Victoria & Abdul
Stephen Frears’ film Victoria and Abdul, opens in 1887, with the festivities for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, celebrating her 50-year reign.
Abdul Karim, a young Muslim clerk from Agra, India, is sent to the banquet all the way from India to present the queen with a gift from India, a ceremonial coin. To the dismay of Queen Victoria’s courtiers, the Indian servant strikes a deep friendship with the octogenarian Queen Victoria, defying class and racial boundaries.
According to the movie, Abdul Karim impressed the British sovereign with his depth of spirit and good looks. Soon the unlikely friends became inseparable, discussing philosophy, literature, even Indian cuisine. In a span of 14 years, Abdul Karm became the queen’s confidant and munshi, her teacher, in Urdu.
But the queen’s courtesans and her family, sidelined by Abdul, questioned her sanity and considered her removal.
Historian and author Shrabani Basu based her book of the same title on the queen’s journals in Urdu and on Karim’s private diary. Basu discovered Abdul Karim’s personal diary in possession of Karim’s surviving nephew Abdul Rashid in 2010, over a century after the queen’s death.
This was the only document on the relationship between royal and servant that survived the wrath of Queen Victoria’s children. Immediately after her death in 1901, the royals evicted Queen Victoria’s munshi, burned everything he had received from the queen and swiftly shipped him and his family to India. In 1909 Abdul Karim died in Agra leaving his diary as his only testimonial of his deep friendship with the empress.
Director Frears offers captivating cinematography while Dame Judi Dench portrays a free-spirited Queen Victoria and Indian actor Ali Fazal embodies a charming and loyal Adbul Karim.
Though the film does not depict a romantic relationship between the two, it does hint to it. Dench describes the queen’s reaction to Karim:
“She had a ready eye for somebody good-looking, which he is very, so it was easy to imagine a kind of tired, poor person suddenly looking up and seeing this wonderful good-looking young man. How lovely somebody at last beautiful to look at,” Dench said.
But, author Basu says, “At the heart of this book is a story of friendship, a friendship of two different people from two different specters of this world, one is the Empress of India, one is a clerk from Agra jail, and somewhere they have a bond they find this link and a common space.”
American Made
American Made, by Bourne Identity filmmaker Doug Liman, offers a satirical look at the political crisis in Nicaragua.
It shows the involvement of the United States in the revolution during the late 1970s and 1980s through the perspective of pilot Barry Seal, who, for the right price, delivers guns to Nicaragua on behalf of the CIA, and cocaine into the U.S. on behalf of the Colombian cartel. Somewhere in between, Seal also works for the DEA.
Tom Cruise offers an engaging interpretation as Barry Seal, piloting the plane and doing all the stunts throughout the film. Cruise explains what drew him to the character:
“He just couldn’t help himself,” Cruise said. “He just had to live this life. He literally when you are talking about someone living on the edge, he didn’t even realize he was on the edge. He was just living life and not really thinking of necessary ramifications and what’s going to happen.”
As in most of his action film projects, Cruise pushes his boundaries.
“I don’t make a movie just to make a movie,” he said. “It’s not what interests me. What interests me is the passion of cinema, the passion of storytelling. That’s when it gets very exciting, not just a job. I love this too much.”
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We’re liberating the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending September 30, 2017.
Last week featured a rare treat: a Hot Shot Debut single in the Top Five. We’re happy to announce that this week, history repeats itself.
Number 5: Sam Smith “Too Good At Goodbyes”
It happens in fifth place, where Sam Smith re-surfaces.
Sam tallies his sixth Top 20 – and his third Top Five – hit, “Too Good At Goodbyes”. Back home in the U.K., the news is even better, where it becomes Sam’s sixth number one. This is the opening single from his upcoming second album. It’s been three years since he dropped “In The Lonely Hour.” Sam says he wants the album to update us on his love life… which according to him is still terrible.
Number 4: Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee Featuring Justin Bieber “Despacito”
Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber aren’t suffering too terribly with “Despacito”: the former 16-week champ weakens a slot in fourth place.
Fans of Daddy Yankee are helping him aid victims of natural disasters. Last week, he went on social media to elicit donations for those devastated by Hurricane Maria in the Caribbean, and the massive earthquake in Mexico. Working with several charities, he collected donations of diapers, batteries, bottled water and other essentials. Daddy Yankee also joined forces with Feeding America, which will bring food donations to 78 municipalities in Puerto Rico.
Number 3: Logic Featuring Alessia Cara & Khalid “1-800-273-8255”
Logic bumps it up two slots to third place with “1-800-273-8255” featuring Alessia Cara and Khalid.
This is now the highest-charting single in Hot 100 history with a telephone number as its title. Back in 1982, the rock band Tommy Tutone peaked at number four with “867-5309/Jenny.” Actually, no fewer than seven songs bearing phone number titles have made it into the Hot 100.
Number 2: Cardi B “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)”
Cardi B remains a strong contender at number two with “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves).”
Cardi recently said she was going to push back her album, originally slated for an October release. Posting on Twitter, rapper J Cole advised her not to pressure herself to release an album…just keep dropping strong singles.
Number 1: Taylor Swift “Look What You Made Me Do”
Taylor Swift stays strong atop the Hot 100 for a third week with “Look What You Made Me Do.”
Did you know Taylor threw a Halloween party last year? Naturally, it drew top celebs: model Gigi Hadid was there along with Camila Cabello, who dressed as a “Grandma Who Couldn’t Find Her Cat Because She Sat On It.”
We’ll find our way to number one next week and we hope you’ll join us.
Having enough clean drinking water has been a challenge in many parts of the world, whether it’s a place where water is scarce or abundant. The World Health Organization finds 3 in 10 people globally still lack safe drinking water at home.
The U.S. Department of Energy has just announced it is providing up to $15 million in funding for projects to develop solar desalination technology to create freshwater at a lower cost. Even before the announcement, researchers had been working on better ways to desalinate water.
“We can take any quality of water that we’re starting with and we can turn it into any quality of water that we desire at the end, and the only real challenge or limitation has to be overcome is how much does it cost and how much energy does it take to go from here to here,” said Eric Hoek, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Water Planet Inc.
Cheaper energy
Water treatment plants are largely driven by electricity. A cheaper source of energy is the sun.
“What’s changed in the last five to 10 years, solar has gotten cheap,” Hoek said.
“The only reason that that has not taken over the world at this point is that it’s still intermittent. The sun goes up and it comes down. You have power when it’s up and don’t when it’s down. What you need to make that a continuous base load is you need batteries, which you can charge up during the day, discharge at night, and the cost of batteries is still currently pretty high.”
Household system
Qilin Li at Rice University is building a desalination system that uses solar energy with broad drinking water applications for “individual households or small communities that live in remote locations, especially those who don’t have access to municipal water supply, don’t have a stable supply of electricity. This technology can be an ideal technology,” Li said.
Her solar-powered desalination system can “also benefit megacities in developing countries that don’t have the extensive water and power infrastructure we enjoy here in developed countries, and that kind of relief perhaps in not providing all the water for the whole city, but can relieve some of their need or dependency on the power grid,” Li said.
The goal of Li’s system is to make it modular and cost efficient so it could either meet the needs of a small household or a large community.
Li and her team created a reactor to distill water using heat from the sun. Water turns into vapor, goes through a porous membrane and becomes pure water. Li says a low cost coating on the membrane developed at Rice University makes this unique.
“So it (membrane) harvests the sunlight, converts the photon energy in the sunlight to heat highly efficiently to generate water vapor, and it also serves a separation function to keep the contaminants on the dirty side of the membrane and only allow pure water vapor to go through,” Li said.
Waste heat
The sun is not the only low cost source of energy. Amy Childress’ lab at the University of Southern California (USC) looks at how waste heat that comes from manufacturing can be used as a resource.
“With waste heat you’re going to have cycles and spikes. We’ve gone out to the field, measured waste heat at an industrial site. We come back. We plug that into our system, so that we can repeat that waste heat curve over and over and watch the response of membranes to the waste heat,” said Childress, who directs USC’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department’s environmental engineering program.
Her lab looks at how waste heat would impact the longevity and properties of a membrane.
Childress says the work in her lab will be helpful in the development of better membranes.
Filters in demand
There is high demand for membranes that help produce clean water. Water Planet’s PolyCera® membrane used to treat wastewater, is finding broader applications.
“We have a lot of interest now around the world, not just in industrial wastewater, but we’re actually making point-of-use under-the-sink water filters for applications in India, in China and here in the U.S. We’re making membranes that are being tested now for deployment offshore in sea water desalination to produce drinking water in barges and in platforms,” Hoek said.
With nearly 30 percent of the world’s population lacking safe drinking water at home, researchers will continue to work on harnessing free energy to clean water.
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Having enough clean drinking water has been a challenge in many parts of the world, whether it is a place where water is scarce or abundant. The U.S. Department of Energy has just announced it is providing $15 million in funding for projects to develop solar desalination technology at a lower cost. But even before this announcement, researchers had been working on better ways of desalinating water. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
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A long-running effort to build one of the world’s largest telescopes on a mountain sacred to Native Hawaiians is moving forward after a key approval Thursday, reopening divisions over a project that promises revolutionary views into the heavens but has drawn impassioned protests over the impact to a spiritual place.
Hawaii’s land board granted a construction permit for the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope atop the state’s tallest mountain, called Mauna Kea, but opponents likely would appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court. Protesters willing to be arrested were successful in blocking construction in the past.
“For the Hawaiian people, I have a message: This is our time to rise as a people,” said Kahookahi Kanuha, a protest leader. “This is our time to take back all of the things that we know are ours. All the things that were illegally taken from us.”
No construction soon
Telescope officials don’t have any immediate construction plans and will consider its next steps, said Scott Ishikawa, a project spokesman. Officials previously have said they want to resume building in 2018.
“In moving forward, we will listen respectfully to the community in order to realize the shared vision of Mauna Kea as a world center for Hawaiian culture, education and science,” TMT International Observatory Board Chairman Henry Yang said in a statement.
Richard Ha, a Native Hawaiian farmer who supports the project, urged opponents to avoid confrontation.
“The possibility of getting the best telescope in the world … I don’t feel is the right battle to fight,” he said. “It will hurt our own people.”
While opponents say constructing the telescope will desecrate Mauna Kea, supporters tout the instrument’s ability to provide long-term educational and economic opportunities.
“This was one of the most difficult decisions this board has ever made,” state Board of Land and Natural Resources Chairwoman Suzanne Case said in a statement about the 5-2 decision.
Plans for the project date to 2009, when scientists selected Mauna Kea after a five-year around-the-world campaign to find the ideal site for what telescope officials said “will likely revolutionize our understanding of the universe.”
The project won a series of approvals from Hawaii, including a permit to build on conservation land in 2011. Protesters blocked attempts to start construction. Then in 2015, the state Supreme Court invalidated the permit, saying the board’s approval process was flawed, and ordered the project to go through the steps again.
Protests from the beginning
Protests disrupted a groundbreaking in 2014 and intensified after that. Construction stopped in 2015 after 31 demonstrators were arrested for blocking the work.
A second attempt to restart construction a few months later ended with more arrests and crews retreating.
Mehana Kihoi said being arrested while praying on the mountain was one of the most traumatic experiences of her life. She started going there to help heal from domestic violence, Kihoi told the land board earlier this month.
“For years, I carried grief and pain … until I went to the mauna,” she said, using the Hawaiian word for mountain.
Culture over money
Kanuha, a protest leader, dismissed the millions that telescope officials have paid toward educating youth on the Big Island in science, technology, engineering and math. So far, $3.5 million has been paid into the educational fund, even while the project’s construction permit was invalid.
That money isn’t the answer to improving the lives of Native Hawaiian youth, Kanuha said. Revitalization of language and culture through Hawaiian-focused education is what’s important, he said.
A group of Native Hawaiian telescope supporters formed a group called Perpetuating Unique Educational Opportunities. Some members had been against the telescope in the past, said the group’s attorney, Lincoln Ashida.
“We believe that with increased opportunities for children, that results in stronger families, which in turn benefits our community,” Ashida told the board.
A group of universities in California and Canada make up the telescope company, with partners from China, India and Japan. The instrument’s primary mirror would measure 98 feet (30 meters) in diameter. Compared with the largest existing visible-light telescope in the world, it would be three times as wide, with nine times more area.
Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano, has been the first choice, telescope officials said, calling it the best location in the world for astronomy. Its summit provides a clear view of the sky for 300 days a year, with little air and light pollution. They selected an alternate site in Spain’s Canary Islands if the telescope couldn’t be built in Hawaii.
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Emmy-winning comedic actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus said Thursday that she was battling breast cancer, and she highlighted the case for universal health care in the United States.
Louis-Dreyfus, 56, who plays foul-mouthed fictitious former U.S. President Selina Meyer on HBO’s Veep, said, “1 in 8 women get breast cancer. Today, I’m the one,” in a short post on her social media platforms.
“The good news is that I have the most glorious group of supportive and caring family and friends, and fantastic insurance through my union. The bad news is that not all women are so lucky, so let’s fight all cancers and make universal health care a reality,” she wrote.
She did not give any further details of her health status.
Time Warner’s HBO network said Louis-Dreyfus received the diagnosis a day after the Emmy Awards this month, where she won a record sixth consecutive Emmy for comedy actress for her role as Meyer. The Emmys are U.S. television’s highest honor.
HBO added that her diagnosis played no part in its decision to end Veep after next season, and that writers would keep working on the final season while production would be adjusted around the actress’ schedule.
“Our love and support go out to Julia and her family at this time. We have every confidence she will get through this with her usual tenacity and undaunted spirit, and look forward to her return to health and to HBO for the final season of Veep,” HBO said in a statement.
Louis-Dreyfus achieved fame in the 1990s for her role as Elaine Benes on NBC’s Seinfeld, which also won her an Emmy.
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Oppressor or liberator? Feminist in a silk robe, or pipe-smoking exploiter? Opinions were flying a day after Hugh Hefner’s death over just what he did — and didn’t do — for women.
On one side, there were those who saw Hefner’s dressing women in bunny costumes with cottontails on their rears, or displaying them nude in his magazine with a staple in their navels, as simple subjugation of females, no matter how slick and smooth the packaging. On the other were those who felt the Playboy founder was actually at the forefront of the sexual revolution, bringing sexuality into the mainstream and advancing the cause of feminism with his stand on social issues, especially abortion rights.
“I think it’s disgusting,” said feminist author Susan Brownmiller, of the praise she’d been seeing on social media since Hefner’s death Wednesday at age 91. “Even some of my Facebook friends are hewing to the notion that, gee whiz, he supported abortion, he supported civil rights. … Yes he was for abortion, [because] if you convince your girlfriend to get an abortion because she got pregnant, you don’t have to think about marrying her! I mean, that was his point.”
Most offensive to Brownmiller was what she called Hefner’s equating the word “feminist” with “anti-sex.”
“It wasn’t that we were opposed to a liberation of sexual morality,” she said, “but the idea that he would make women into little bunnies, rabbits, with those ears. … That was the horror of it.”
It was Brownmiller, in fact, who confronted Hefner nearly a half-century ago on Dick Cavett’s talk show, saying to his face, “Hugh Hefner is my enemy.” As a startled Hefner fiddled with his pipe, she added: “The day that you are willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to YOUR rear end …” The audience roared.
Brownmiller attributed some of the glowing tributes to Hefner in part to “an American tradition of saying nice things about the departed.”
For Kathy Spillar, executive editor of Ms. Magazine, the accolades were a result of something deeper: a decades-long public relations strategy of Playboy to sanitize what she called an empire devoted to the subjugation of women.
“From the beginning, they tried to sell it as women’s liberation,” said Spillar, who also directs the Feminist Majority Foundation. “And so they made huge outreach efforts over the years to women’s rights groups.” But there was nothing liberating about it, Spillar said: “Those photographs of women certainly aren’t empowering of those women. They’re there for the pleasure of men.”
“He was right about one thing,” Spillar added. “Sex sells. But it sells to men. And to put women in those horrible costumes that Gloria Steinem wrote about! Talk about sexual harassment, talk a hostile work environment.” She was referring to the famous magazine expose that a young Steinem went undercover to write, training as a Playboy bunny in a New York club — bunny suit and all.
Hefner himself, obviously, saw it very differently. “The truth of the matter is the bunnies were the pre-feminist feminists,” Hefner told the Associated Press in 2011. “They were the beginning, really, of independent women. The bunnies were earning more money than, in many cases, their fathers and their husbands. That was a revolution.”
To Kathryn Leigh Scott, a former bunny at the New York club, much of what Hefner said then rings true. Scott trained at the club in January 1963, at age 19, she says, with six other bunnies, one of them Steinem. She said she had fun, and made good money. She later wrote a book, The Bunny Years, to counter the view that Steinem portrayed in her article.
“I did not feel exploited,” Scott says now. “As a matter of fact, I felt that I was exploiting Playboy — because I was earning very good money in a very safe environment, certainly safer than that many of my friends were working in at the time.”
Did Hefner advance or exploit women? Scott says she can see both sides. “But when you think of what he did to support Roe v. Wade for example, and civil rights, and what I know from his treatment of me, he did a lot to help women,” she said.
In the wake of Hefner’s death, many celebrities tweeted affectionate messages. “Thank you for being a revolutionary and changing so many people’s lives, especially mine,” wrote television personality and former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy. “We’ve lost a true explorer, a man who had a keen sense of the future,” wrote writer-producer Norman Lear. “We learned a lot from you Mr. Hefner.”
For feminist author and blogger Andi Zeisler, the main question was why Hefner was getting so much credit.
“He’s getting a disproportionate amount of credit for the sexual revolution,” said Zeisler, founder of the nonprofit Bitch Media. “It was a confluence of factors. He had nothing to do with the development of oral contraception, which I could argue was really the main driver of the sexual revolution where women were concerned.
“I think it’s safe to say that anything progressive that Hugh Hefner was for, he was for because it also benefited white men,” Zeisler said.
As for Steinem, who briefly wore that bunny suit in the early `60s, she preferred not to comment so close to Hefner’s death.
“Obit time,” she wrote in an email, “is not the time for truth-telling. People will now be free to tell it, but later.”
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Around the world, women are using technology to overcome barriers in education and employment. Getting online, however, remains a challenge for many women in developing countries.
In the United States, the issue isn’t access to technology, but the lack of women pursuing technical careers.
Beginning Oct. 4 in Orlando, Florida, female leaders will discuss the digital gender divide at Voice of America’s town hall at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.
“The tech ecosystem has, sadly, not been welcoming to women,” said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, founder of ReadySet, a diversity consultancy that works in the tech industry.
Women struggle for access
Globally, women struggle for access to technology. Proportionally, the number of women using the internet is 12 percent lower, compared to men. In the least developed countries, only one in seven women is using the internet, compared to one in five men, according to a 2017 study.
“The digital divide is basically this phenomenon that some people have more access to digital technology than others or use it more than others, which is actually an unavoidable thing,” said Martin Hilbert, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis. “Every innovation that comes to society doesn’t form uniformly from heaven. It diffuses through society.”
In a study of 25 countries in Africa and Latin America, Hilbert noted that if he adjusted for income, education and job opportunities, more women than men were online. “The fact that they turn up less is because they have less access to money, education and work opportunities,” he said.
Cultural barriers
Women also face some cultural barriers, said Nighat Dad, executive director of the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan.
The biggest reason she sees for why women are not getting online is what she describes as “the cultural norms or the family values.”
“The middle-class families or lower-class families think that access to computers or access to technologies is a boy’s basic rights and not the girls’ because the girls don’t need it,” she said.
Tara Chklovski, founder and chief executive of Iridescent, an organization that works to promote girls in tech worldwide, said her organization has worked with local partners to overcome barriers.
“There’s a country in Africa, where it is not cool for girls to own phones, only middle-age men,” she said. “When we came in and said we want to teach girls, they said why don’t you teach boys or why don’t you teach these men. We had to work for many years to address barriers.”
Women ‘held to higher bar’
In the U.S., there is a lively debate over why women continue to lag behind men in the tech industry. Women make up about 20 percent of companies’ technical workforce and about the same in leadership roles, said Caroline Simard, research director at the Clayman Institute of Gender Research at Stanford University.
“Often women are held to a higher bar to be successful,” said Simard. “They have to work harder to prove the same amount of competence.”
And when it comes to venture capitalists, who finance the startup ecosystem, not many are women.
“I joke in my profession, I don’t have to stand in line for a bathroom,” said Kate Mitchell, a partner at Scale Venture Partners. “Five to 10 percent of investing partners are women, depending what study you look at.”
VOA town hall
Women in tech roles inside a firm are at a higher risk of leaving the profession mid-career. Some say they felt they never belonged.
At VOA’s town hall at the Grace Hopper Celebration, leaders in technology will talk about what it will take to continue to close the digital gender divide.
“For the first time in history, technology can really help girls have a strong voice and help us have a society that has equality,” said Chklovski.
Deana Mitchell contributed to this report.
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Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy Magazine has died at the age of 91. Famous for his smoking jacket, his magazine and his lifestyle Hefner singlehandedly changed the publishing industry, and maybe the world. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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You have seen his “Sunflowers” in a museum, sung along with Don McLean to “Vincent (Starry Starry Night)” and gawped at the tens of million of dollars his works have fetched at auction.
But you have never seen Vincent Van Gogh’s art quite like it is shown in the film “Loving Vincent.”
Seven years in the making and billed as the world’s first fully-painted feature film, “Loving Vincent” uses more than 130 of the Dutch artist’s own paintings to tell his own story.
Each of the 65,000 frames of the animated independent film, created by Polish artist and animator Dorota Kobiela, is an oil painting hand painted by 125 professional artists who traveled from around the world to be a part of the project.
“It looks like something completely different, and that doesn’t happen very often in our media-saturated world,” said Hugh Welchman, who co-wrote and directed the film with Kobiela.
“Loving Vincent,” showing in limited release in New York and Los Angeles and arriving in Europe in October, was first filmed with actors playing some of the people Van Gogh captured on canvas.
They include Saiorse Ronan as doctor’s daughter Marguerite Gachet and Chris O’Dowd as postman Joseph Roulin, who walk through and inhabit his paintings as his story unfolds.
Then came the hard part. Finding and training the painters to reproduce Van Gogh’s work.
More than 4,000 artists from around the world applied for the job and 125 were chosen and put through three weeks training.
“Even though we were hiring the very best oil painters, Vincent’s style look like it should be very easy but actually it’s difficult to do well,” said Welchman.
“Even after training there were still quite a few painters who really found it impossible to get to grips with his style,” Welchman said.
The $5.5 million production focuses on the last weeks of Van Gogh’s life before his death in 1890 in France at age 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Welchman said the film has triggered some unusual responses.
“We’ve had a lot of people in tears at screenings. People are sending poems or making cakes with intricate Vincent paintings on the cake,” he said.
He and Kobiela hope the film encourages audiences to discover more about Van Gogh.
“I’d like them to think there is more to his story than he went mad, cut off his ears, was a genius and did these incredibly colorful paintings that sell for lots of money.”
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Senegalese start-ups are testing a fledgling market for online music platforms in French-speaking West Africa, where interest in digital entertainment is growing but a lack of credit cards has prevented big players from making inroads.
Long celebrated in Europe for their contribution to “world” music – with Mali’s Salif Keita, Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour and Benin’s Angelique Kidjo household names in trendy bars – West African musicians have struggled to make money back home, where poverty is widespread and music piracy rampant.
Online music providers such as Apple’s download store iTunes and streaming service Spotify are either unavailable – no one can sign up for Spotify in Africa yet – or require a credit card or bank account, which most West Africans lack.
But smartphone use is surging and entrepreneurs say there is latent demand for platforms tailored to Francophone West Africa, whose Malian “desert blues,” Ivorian “zouglou” and Senegalese “mbalax” cross African borders but are only profitable in Europe, via download and streaming services.
“We started by saying, look, there is a void. Because digital distribution products are made in Europe or the U.S., for Europeans and Americans.” said Moustapha Diop, the founder and CEO of MusikBi, “The Music” in the local Wolof language, a download store launched in 2016.
MusikBi, like its rivals, is small and cash strapped, but with more than 10,000 users, Diop sees potential.
The company received a boost in May when Senegalese-American singer Akon bought 50 percent of it, which Diop says will allow the company to start a new marketing campaign.
MusikBi and rival JokkoText allow users to purchase songs by text message and pay with phone credit, mobile money or cash transfers. Both want to expand throughout West Africa.
Many of the new industry entrants like MusikBi and JokkoText are based in Dakar, which is an emerging tech start-up hub for Francophone West Africa, partly thanks to the fact it has enjoyed relative political and economic stability compared with most of its neighbors.
On the streaming front, Deedo, created by a Senegalese national in France and backed by French bank BPI, will launch in Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast and France next month, and will offer similar payment options. Senegalese hip-hop group Daara J plans o start a streaming platform next year.
There is scant industry presence elsewhere in the region except in Anglophone Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.
Pirates to Payers
Every evening young people jog down Dakar’s streets with headphones in their ears. Most download music illegally online or buy pirated CDs and USB memory sticks in street markets.
Convincing them to pay for content is a challenge, but not an insurmountable one, analysts say.
“Experience shows that people are willing to pay for convenience,” said David Price, director of insight and analysis at London-based industry federation IFPI.
“If you give them something attractive and affordable, they stop pirating,” he said, adding that local platforms have gained followings in Latin America and India.
France’s Deezer has also targeted the region in partnership with mobile operator Tigo, but has not gained a large following. Deedo meanwhile plans to launch a version of its site in Pulaar, one of West Africa’s most widely spoken a languages, founder Awa Girard told Reuters.
Senegalese singer Sahad Sarr told Reuters he had sold some songs on MusikBi and was excited about Deedo, but added: “The culture here is not to buy music online. Change will be slow.”
Most of his listeners on Spotify and other platforms are Senegalese people living in Europe or North America, he said.
At Dakar’s main university, students showed Reuters the many websites they use to download music illegally.
Some said they would pay for a good service, but others were less convinced, like 22-year-old Macodou Loum. “Between two choices, free and not free, we will choose the free one,” he said.
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Drones will help deliver toothbrushes, deodorant and smartphones to Swiss homes this fall as part of a pilot project, the first of its kind over a densely populated area.
Drone firm Matternet, based in Menlo Park, California, said Thursday it’s partnering on the Zurich project with Mercedes-Benz’s vans division and Swiss e-commerce startup Siroop. It’s been approved by Switzerland’s aviation authority.
Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos says the drones will take items from a distribution center and transport them between 8 to 16 kilometers to awaiting delivery vans. The van drivers then bring the packages to homes. Raptopoulos says drones will speed up deliveries, buzzing over congested urban streets or natural barriers like Lake Zurich.
The pilot comes as Amazon, Google and Uber have also been investing in drone delivery research.
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Would you buy a car that sprayed soothing odors when you’re stuck in rush-hour traffic? Or how about a robot that smells like a human being?
Scientists say that new technology means we will soon be using devices like these in our everyday lives. At this month’s British Science Festival in Brighton, researchers from Britain’s University of Sussex offered a demonstration of the technology that could be just around the corner.
The 3D animations of Virtual Reality have become commonplace. Now scientists have created virtual worlds that even smell like the real thing. When users open a virtual door and step into a new world, in this case into a rainforest, diffusers spray the appropriate scent for added authenticity.
Immersive experience
“It is a really immersive experience that you have because you’re exploring this environment and you have smells that correspond with it,” festival visitor Suzanne Fisher-Murray told VOA.
Smell technology has been tried before, famously in the United States with Smell-O-vision movies in the 1960s. Multisensory researcher Emanuela Maggioni of the University of Sussex says it’s on the cusp of a comeback.
“The connection with emotions, memories, and the potential to use the sense of smell, the odors, under the threshold of our awareness — it is incredible what we can do with technology,” Maggioni said.
And not just for entertainment. In another corner of the room, a driving simulator has been fitted with a scent diffuser.
“In this demonstration, we wanted to deliver the smell of lavender every time the driver exceeds the speed limit. We chose lavender because it’s a very calming smell,” co-researcher Dmitrijs Dmitrenko said.
Scent and human behavior
Scientists are experimenting with using scent instead of audible or visual alerts on mobile phones. Businesses already are using scent to influence customers’ behavior.
“Not only for marketing in stores, so creating the logo brand. But on the other side, you can create and stimulate impulse buying. So you’re in a library and you smell coffee and actually you are unconsciously having the need to drink a coffee,” Maggioni said.
She adds that scent is vital in human interactions — for example, when men smell tears, levels of testosterone are reduced and they show more empathy. That physiological reaction can be applied to new technology.
“In the interaction with robots — how we can build trust with robots if the robots smell like us,” Maggioni said.
It portends an exciting, and perhaps for some, daunting future. Scientists say the sense of smell, until now largely unexploited, is about to stimulated by the march of technology.
Would you buy a car that sprayed soothing odors when you’re stuck in rush-hour traffic? Or how about a robot that smells like a human being?
Scientists say that new technology means we will soon be using devices like these in our everyday lives. At this month’s British Science Festival in Brighton, researchers from Britain’s University of Sussex offered a demonstration of the technology that could be just around the corner.
The 3D animations of Virtual Reality have become commonplace. Now scientists have created virtual worlds that even smell like the real thing. When users open a virtual door and step into a new world, in this case into a rainforest, diffusers spray the appropriate scent for added authenticity.
Immersive experience
“It is a really immersive experience that you have because you’re exploring this environment and you have smells that correspond with it,” festival visitor Suzanne Fisher-Murray told VOA.
Smell technology has been tried before, famously in the United States with Smell-O-vision movies in the 1960s. Multisensory researcher Emanuela Maggioni of the University of Sussex says it’s on the cusp of a comeback.
“The connection with emotions, memories, and the potential to use the sense of smell, the odors, under the threshold of our awareness — it is incredible what we can do with technology,” Maggioni said.
And not just for entertainment. In another corner of the room, a driving simulator has been fitted with a scent diffuser.
“In this demonstration, we wanted to deliver the smell of lavender every time the driver exceeds the speed limit. We chose lavender because it’s a very calming smell,” co-researcher Dmitrijs Dmitrenko said.
Scent and human behavior
Scientists are experimenting with using scent instead of audible or visual alerts on mobile phones. Businesses already are using scent to influence customers’ behavior.
“Not only for marketing in stores, so creating the logo brand. But on the other side, you can create and stimulate impulse buying. So you’re in a library and you smell coffee and actually you are unconsciously having the need to drink a coffee,” Maggioni said.
She adds that scent is vital in human interactions — for example, when men smell tears, levels of testosterone are reduced and they show more empathy. That physiological reaction can be applied to new technology.
“In the interaction with robots — how we can build trust with robots if the robots smell like us,” Maggioni said.
It portends an exciting, and perhaps for some, daunting future. Scientists say the sense of smell, until now largely unexploited, is about to stimulated by the march of technology.
Would you buy a car that sprayed soothing aromas when you are stuck in rush-hour traffic? Or how about a robot that has the scent of a real person? Scientists say that new technology means we will soon be using devices like these in our everyday lives. Henry Ridgwell visited this month’s British Science Festival in Brighton, England, to find out more.
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Can children who have never been to school teach themselves basic reading, writing and math skills using only a tablet computer? Elon Musk and the XPrize Foundation are betting $15 million on the idea that they can. VOA’s Tina Trinh has more.
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Playboy founder Hugh M. Hefner, the pipe-smoking hedonist who revved up the sexual revolution in the 1950s and built a multimedia empire of clubs, mansions, movies and television, symbolized by bow-tied women in bunny costumes, has died at age 91.
Hefner died of natural causes at his home surrounded by family Wednesday night, Playboy said in a statement.
As much as anyone, Hefner helped slip sex out of the confines of plain brown wrappers and into mainstream conversation.
Culture change
In 1953, a time when states could legally ban contraceptives, when the word “pregnant” was not allowed on I Love Lucy, Hefner published the first issue of Playboy, featuring naked photos of Marilyn Monroe (taken years earlier) and an editorial promise of “humor, sophistication and spice.” The Great Depression and World War II were over, and America was ready to get undressed.
Playboy soon became forbidden fruit for teenagers and a bible for men with time and money, primed for the magazine’s prescribed evenings of dimmed lights, hard drinks, soft jazz, deep thoughts and deeper desires. Within a year, circulation neared 200,000. Within five years, it had topped 1 million.
By the 1970s, the magazine had more than 7 million readers and had inspired such raunchier imitations as Penthouse and Hustler. Competition and the internet reduced circulation to less than 3 million by the 21st century, and the number of issues published annually was cut from 12 to 11. In 2015, Playboy ceased publishing images of naked women, citing the proliferation of nudity on the internet.
But Hefner and Playboy remained brand names worldwide.
Asked by The New York Times in 1992 of what he was proudest, Hefner responded: “That I changed attitudes toward sex. That nice people can live together now. That I decontaminated the notion of premarital sex. That gives me great satisfaction.”
Flamboyant symbol
Hefner ran Playboy from his elaborate mansions, first in Chicago and then in Los Angeles, and became the flamboyant symbol of the lifestyle he espoused. For decades he was the pipe-smoking, silk-pajama-wearing center of a constant party with celebrities and Playboy models. By his own account, Hefner had sex with more than a thousand women, including many pictured in his magazine. One of rock ’n’ roll’s most decadent tours, the Rolling Stones shows of 1972, featured a stop at the Hefner mansion.
Throughout the 1960s, Hefner left Chicago only a few times. In the early 1970s, he bought the second mansion in Los Angeles, flying between his homes on a private DC-9 dubbed “The Big Bunny,” which boasted a giant Playboy bunny emblazoned on the tail.
Hefner was host of a television show, Playboy After Dark, and in 1960 opened a string of clubs around the world where waitresses wore revealing costumes with bunny ears and fluffy white bunny tails. In the 21st century, he was back on television in a cable reality show, The Girls Next Door, with three live-in girlfriends in the Los Angeles Playboy mansion. Network television briefly embraced Hefner’s empire in 2011 with the NBC drama The Playboy Club, which failed to lure viewers and was canceled after three episodes.
Censorship and Cosby charges
Censorship was inevitable, starting in the 1950s, when Hefner successfully sued to prevent the U.S. Postal Service from denying him second-class mailing status. Playboy has been banned in China, India, Saudi Arabia and Ireland, and 7-Eleven stores for years did not sell the magazine. Stores that did offer Playboy made sure to stock it on a higher shelf.
Women were warned from the first issue: “If you’re somebody’s sister, wife, or mother-in-law,” the magazine declared, “and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the man in your life and get back to Ladies Home Companion.”
Playboy proved a scourge, and a temptation. Drew Barrymore, Farrah Fawcett and Linda Evans are among those who have posed for the magazine. Several bunnies became celebrities, too, including singer Deborah Harry and model Lauren Hutton, both of whom had fond memories of their time with Playboy.
Other bunnies had traumatic experiences, with several alleging they had been raped by Hefner’s close friend Bill Cosby, who faced dozens of such allegations. Hefner issued a statement in late 2014 he “would never tolerate this behavior.” But two years later, former bunny Chloe Goins sued Cosby and Hefner for sexual battery, gender violence and other charges over an alleged 2008 rape.
Steinem article
One bunny turned out to be a journalist: Feminist Gloria Steinem got hired in the early 1960s and turned her brief employment into an article for Show magazine that described the clubs as pleasure havens for men only. The bunnies, Steinem wrote, tended to be poorly educated, overworked and underpaid. Steinem regarded the magazine and clubs not as erotic, but “pornographic.”
“I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner,” Steinem later said.
“Women are the major beneficiaries of getting rid of the hypocritical old notions about sex,” Hefner responded. “Now some people are acting as if the sexual revolution was a male plot to get laid. One of the unintended by-products of the women’s movement is the association of the erotic impulse with wanting to hurt somebody.”
The Playboy interview
Hefner added that he was a strong advocate of First Amendment, civil rights and reproductive rights and that the magazine contained far more than centerfolds. Playboy serialized Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and later published fiction by John Updike, Doris Lessing and Vladimir Nabokov. Playboy also specialized in long and candid interviews, from Fidel Castro and Frank Sinatra to Marlon Brando and then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, who confided that he had “committed adultery” in his heart. John Lennon spoke to Playboy in 1980, not long before he was murdered.
The line that people read Playboy for the prose, not the pictures, was only partly a joke.
Playboy’s clubs also influenced the culture, giving early breaks to such entertainers as George Carlin, Rich Little, Mark Russell, Dick Gregory and Redd Foxx. The last of the clubs closed in 1988, when Hefner deemed them passe and “too tame for the times.”
By then Hefner had built a $200 million company by expanding Playboy to include international editions of the magazine, casinos, a cable network and a film production company. In 2006, he got back into the club business with his Playboy Club at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas. A new enterprise in London followed, along with fresh response from women’s groups, who protested the opening with cries of “Eff off Hef!”
Playmate murder
Hefner liked to say he was untroubled by criticism, but in 1985 he suffered a mild stroke that he blamed on the book The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980, by filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. Stratten was a Playmate killed by her husband, Paul Snider, who then killed himself. Bogdanovich, Stratton’s boyfriend at the time, wrote that Hefner helped bring about her murder and was unable to deal with “what he and his magazine do to women.”
After the stroke, Hefner handed control of his empire to his feminist daughter, Christie, although he owned 70 percent of Playboy stock and continued to choose every month’s Playmate and cover shot. Christie Hefner continued as CEO until 2009.
He also stopped using recreational drugs and tried less to always be the life of the party. He tearfully noted in a 1992 New York Times interview: “I’ve spent so much of my life looking for love in all the wrong places.”
Married life
Not surprisingly, Hefner’s marriage life was also a bit of a show. In 1949, he married Mildred Williams, with whom he had two children. They divorced in 1958. In July 1989, Hefner married Kimberley Conrad, the 1989 Playmate of the Year, who was then 27. The couple also had two children.
On the eve of his marriage, Hefner was asked if he would have a bachelor party. “I’ve had a bachelor party for 30 years,” he said. “Why do I need one now?”
They separated in 1998 but she continued living next door to the Playboy mansion with their two sons. The couple divorced in 2010 and he proposed in 2011 to 24-year-old Crystal Harris, a former Playmate. Harris called off the wedding days before the ceremony, but changed her mind and they married at the end of 2012.
“Maybe I should be single,” he said a few months later. “But I do know that I need an ongoing romantic relationship. In other words, I am essentially a very romantic person, and all I really was looking for, quite frankly, with the notion of marriage was continuity and something to let the girl know that I really cared.”
He acknowledged, at age 85, that “I never really found my soulmate.”
Strict childhood
Hefner was born in Chicago on April 9, 1926, to devout Methodist parents who he said never showed “love in a physical or emotional way.”
“At a very early age, I began questioning a lot of that religious foolishness about man’s spirit and body being in conflict, with God primarily with the spirit of man and the Devil dwelling in the flesh,” Hefner said in a Playboy interview in 1974.
“Part of the reason that I am who I am is my Puritan roots run deep,” he told the AP in 2011. “My folks are Puritan. My folks are prohibitionists. There was no drinking in my home. No discussion of sex. And I think I saw the hurtful and hypocritical side of that from very early on. “
Hefner loved movies throughout his life, calling them “my other family.” He screened classic films and new releases at the mansion every week. Every year on his April 9 birthday, he’d run his favorite film, Casablanca, and invite guests to dress in the fashions of the 1940s.
Magazine’s beginnings
He was a playboy before Playboy, even during his first marriage, when he enjoyed stag films, strip poker and group sex. His bunny obsession began with the figures that decorated a childhood blanket. Years later, a real-life subspecies of rabbit on the endangered species list, in the Florida Keys, would be named for him: Sylvilagus palustris hefneri.
When Hefner was 9, he began publishing a neighborhood newspaper, which he sold for a penny a copy. He spent much of his time writing and drawing cartoons, and in middle school began reading Esquire, a magazine of sex and substance Hefner wanted Playboy to emulate.
He and Playboy co-founder Eldon Sellers launched their magazine from Hefner’s kitchen in Chicago, although the first issue was undated because Hefner doubted there would be a second. The magazine was supposed to be called Stag Party, until an outdoor magazine named Stag threatened legal action.
Hefner recalled that he first reinvented himself in high school in Chicago at 16, when he was rejected by a girl he had a crush on. He began referring to himself as Hef instead of Hugh, learned the jitterbug and began drawing a comic book, “a kind of autobiography that put myself center stage in a life I created for myself,” he said in a 2006 interview with the AP.
Those comics evolved into a detailed scrapbook that Hefner would keep throughout his life. It spanned more than 2,500 volumes in 2011, a Guinness World Record for a personal scrapbook collection.
“It was probably just a way of creating a world of my own to share with my friends,” Hefner said, seated amid the archives of his life during a 2011 interview. “And in retrospect, in thinking about it, it’s not a whole lot different than creating the magazine.”
He did it again in 1960, when he began hosting the TV show, bought a fancy car, started smoking a pipe and bought the first Playboy mansion.
“Well, if we hadn’t had the Wright brothers, there would still be airplanes,” Hefner said in 1974. “If there hadn’t been an Edison, there would still be electric lights. And if there hadn’t been a Hefner, we’d still have sex. But maybe we wouldn’t be enjoying it as much. So the world would be a little poorer. Come to think of it, so would some of my relatives.”
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