Silicon

In most of the world, more men are connected to the internet than women. But in Africa, this gender gap has been widening, according to ITU, the U.N. agency tracking the ICT sector. Nanjira Sambuli, who works with the World Wide Web Foundation in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, sat down with VOA’s Jill Craig in Nairobi to explain how offline inequalities are being replicated online.
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Social media giant Facebook is expected to provide Congress on Monday with more than 3,000 ads that ran around the time of the 2016 presidential election and are linked to a Russian ad agency.

Company officials will meet with the House and Senate intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee to hand over the ads, a Facebook official said. The official requested anonymity because the meetings are private.

Facebook said last month that it had found thousands of ads linked to Facebook accounts that likely operated out of Russia and pushed divisive social and political issues during the U.S. presidential election. The company said it found 450 accounts and about $100,000 was spent on the ads.

Twitter has said it found postings linked to those same accounts, and the House and Senate intelligence panels have asked both companies, along with Google, to testify publicly in the coming weeks.

None of the companies have said whether they will accept the invitations.

The three committees are investigating Russian meddling in the election and whether there are any links to President Donald Trump’s campaign. They have recently focused on the spread of false news stories and propaganda on social media, putting pressure on the companies to turn over more information and release any Russia-linked ads.

It is unclear whether the ads will eventually be released publicly. Several lawmakers — including Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel — have said they believe the American public should see them.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced September 21 that the company would provide the ads to Congress and also make changes to ensure the political ads on its platform are more transparent. The company is also working with special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation into the Russian meddling.

“As a general rule, we are limited in what we can discuss publicly about law enforcement investigations, so we may not always be able to share our findings publicly,” Zuckerberg said. “But we support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete.”

Facebook said the ads addressed social and political issues and ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017. The company said the ads appear to have come from accounts associated with a Russian entity called the Internet Research Agency.

Twitter said last week that it had suspended 22 accounts corresponding to the 450 Facebook accounts that were likely operated out of Russia.

Warner criticized Twitter for not sharing more information with Congress, saying the company’s findings were merely “derivative” of Facebook’s work. The company’s presentations to staff last week “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions,” he said.
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Scrolling through dating websites a year ago, Indonesian app developer Lindu Pranayama realized there were a lot of married men looking for another wife – but few online services to meet their needs.

“When they go to regular dating sites, they don’t see options for polygamy. They don’t see options for finding second, third or fourth wives,” he said.

Enter “AyoPoligami” – a new smartphone app developed by Pranayama, which aims to “bring together male users with women who are willing to make ‘big families’.”

Loosely translated as “Let’s do polygamy”, the Tinder-style dating app has already stirred up controversy since its April launch in Indonesia, where over 80 percent of the 250 million population are Muslim and polygamy is legal.

Muslim men can take up to four wives in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, if permission is granted by a court and the first wife gives her consent.

Court officials could not provide figures of how many people in Indonesia are polygamous, but activists say cases of men giving false information to gain permission and manipulation of women are common.

The app has been downloaded over 10,000 times before it stopped registering new members following concerns of fake accounts were being set up, and men using the site without the knowledge of their first wives.

A new version is set to be launched on Oct. 5, and will impose stricter rules on users including requiring them to provide an identification card, marital status and a letter of permission from their first wives.

‘This is what God planned for me’

Iyus Yusuf Fasyiya, an Indonesian factory worker who has two wives, said he used the app to share tips with other users on how to maintain a polygamous marriage.

“Many members are looking for wives – they ask about how to start, how to maintain polygamous marriages, and also government regulations,” he said from his home village in Bogor, about 90-minute drive from the capital Jakarta.

The 37-year-old dodged questions about whether he was using the app to look for another wife but said he continues to learn about polygamy, after he took on his second wife six years following his first marriage in 2000.

“It just happened, this is what God planned for me,” said Fasyiya, who takes turns to see his two wives and five children who live in nearby villages.

The majority of the app users were men, but there were also about 4,000 women who have registered, the app developer said.

Lawyer Rachmat Dwi Putranto, who deals with marriage matters, said polygamy is “not that easily achieved” as Indonesian courts will only give permission if the first wife is disabled, ill or cannot bear children.

Violence against women

But Indriyati Suparno, a commissioner from the government-backed National Commission on Violence Against Women, said the app was trying to “normalize polygamy”.

“The reality is women tend to be the victims of domestic violence in a polygamous marriage – polygamy is a form of violence against women,” she said.

Indonesia’s Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry said it was up to individuals if they wanted to use the app because polygamy is legal as long as it can be done in a fair manner.

“For us what is important is whether the women and children are protected in polygamous marriages,” the ministry’s spokesman Hasan, who uses one name, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

User Fasyiya said he will continue to refer to the app to learn how to juggle his two families.

“Me and my wives, we’re committed to showing people that polygamy isn’t as scary as they think,” he said.

“We’re trying to make it work.”
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Social media giant Facebook is expected to provide Congress on Monday with more than 3,000 ads that ran around the time of the 2016 presidential election and are linked to a Russian ad agency.

Company officials will meet with the House and Senate intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee to hand over the ads, a Facebook official said. The official requested anonymity because the meetings are private.

Facebook said last month that it had found thousands of ads linked to Facebook accounts that likely operated out of Russia and pushed divisive social and political issues during the U.S. presidential election. The company said it found 450 accounts and about $100,000 was spent on the ads.

Twitter has said it found postings linked to those same accounts, and the House and Senate intelligence panels have asked both companies, along with Google, to testify publicly in the coming weeks.

None of the companies have said whether they will accept the invitations.

The three committees are investigating Russian meddling in the election and whether there are any links to President Donald Trump’s campaign. They have recently focused on the spread of false news stories and propaganda on social media, putting pressure on the companies to turn over more information and release any Russia-linked ads.

It is unclear whether the ads will eventually be released publicly. Several lawmakers – including Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel – have said they believe the American public should see them.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Sept. 21 that the company would provide the ads to Congress and also make changes to ensure the political ads on its platform are more transparent. The company is also working with Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation into the Russian meddling at the Justice Department.

“As a general rule, we are limited in what we can discuss publicly about law enforcement investigations, so we may not always be able to share our findings publicly,” Zuckerberg said. “But we support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete.”

Facebook said the ads addressed social and political issues and ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017. The company said the ads appear to have come from accounts associated with a Russian entity called the Internet Research Agency.

Twitter said last week that it had suspended 22 accounts corresponding to the 450 Facebook accounts that were likely operated out of Russia.

Warner criticized Twitter for not sharing more information with Congress, saying the company’s findings were merely “derivative” of Facebook’s work. The company’s presentations to staff last week “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions.”
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Facebook Inc founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg asked for forgiveness for ways his work was used to divide people in a Facebook posting marking the end of Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement on Saturday.

“For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I will work to do better,” Zuckerberg said in the post.

He did not refer to specific issues in the message, which comes as Facebook and other technology companies are under increased scrutiny amid a U.S. investigation into potential Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.

Facebook said on September 6 it had found that an operation, likely based in Russia, spent $100,000 on thousands of U.S. ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year-period through May.

Facebook, the dominant social media network, said 3,000 ads and 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages spread polarizing views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights.

Facebook has launched an overhaul of how it handles paid political advertisements, after U.S. lawmakers threatened to regulate the world’s largest social network over secretive ads that run during election campaigns.

Probes being conducted by several congressional committees along with the Department of Justice, have clouded U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure since he took office in January and have threatened his agenda, which has yet to secure a major legislative victory.
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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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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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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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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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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.

 
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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.

 
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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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Can children who have never been to school teach themselves basic reading, writing and math skills using only a tablet computer?

The World Bank and XPrize are betting $15 million on the idea.

“It’s a little bit out there, it’s a little bit of a crazy idea,” said Matt Keller, senior director of the Global Learning XPrize, a competition funded by the XPrize Foundation, a non-profit that spurs inventors to tackle global problems such as climate change and universal healthcare.

The inaugural Global Learning XPrize competition awards $10 million dollars to the team or company that develops the best educational app for children who have never set foot in a classroom. According to UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics, approximately 263 million children around the world are not in school.

“Can you develop something that’s so intuitive, so inferential, so dynamic that you give it to a child who is illiterate in a very remote part of the world — she picks it up, she touches it and she begins to learn how to read? That’s the challenge we put out to the world,” said Keller.

The finalists

At least 198 teams were up to the challenge. From that pool, five finalists were recently selected and awarded $1 million dollars each.

The finalists will begin testing their educational apps this November. Nearly 4,000 children from 150 villages in the Tanga region of Tanzania will use tablets donated by Google to access the apps and teach themselves.

A subset of students initially will be tested on literacy and numeracy comprehension using the early grade reading assessment (EGRA) and early grade math assessment (EGMA) models. After 15 months, the same students will be re-tested. The grand prize of $10 million will be awarded to the developer team with the highest proficiency gains among students. 

XPrize is working with UNESCO, the World Food Program, and the government of Tanzania to distribute and maintain the tablets.

“Most development organizations and most aid agencies and most governments are focused on building new schools and training new teachers,” Keller told VOA News, “What we’re saying is there are a lot of kids out there who don’t access school and there are a lot of kids out there who access really bad schools. So, can you give technology to a child that’s so good that it doesn’t supplant, but supplements a learning process that she may or may not have?”

Goals for the future

By 2030, the world will need to recruit 68.8 million teachers in order to meet the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal of universal primary and secondary education, according to a 2016 report by UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics.

“That’s simply not possible,” said Jamie Stuart, co-founder of educational non-profit Onebillion, which is one of the five Global Learning XPrize finalists. “So we have to look for radical alternatives in terms of children’s learning,” said Stuart.

Developers at Onebillion already have field-tested their app, Onecourse, for the past 10 years in Malawi. The app is designed so that children can use it with little or no adult assistance, and teaches children reading and numeracy using a teacher character that speaks their language.

Testing brings many challenges, the least of which involves working with populations that often never have interacted with a tablet before.

“Keeping it simple, keeping it focused on the individual needs of the child, and adapting to how they learn are the key ingredients,” said Stuart.

The other finalists are Curriculum Concepts International (CCI), a lesson-based app that incorporates games, videos and books, Chimple, which focuses on play and discovery-based learning, Kitkit School , which originally was designed for special needs children, and RoboTutor, which was developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“If we can prove that a child needs no instruction other than what’s on that device, then we begin a series of events that will lead inexorably to a device that is designed for that child, in that part of the world, with a teacher on it,” said Keller.
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Digital devices designed to monitor the wearer’s health in much greater detail than current models will need regulatory approval, and Apple, Fitbit and seven other companies will take part in a program to speed the approval process, the U.S. health regulator said Tuesday.

The firms will take part in a program that could make it faster for digital health devices to come to market by requiring less information to be sent to regulators ahead of time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said.

Current devices, like the Apple Watch or Fitbit Blaze, measure things like motion and heart rate. But to take further measurements like blood oxygen or glucose, future devices might full under regulatory review. That review can take months or years, which is far slower than the pace of software updates from most technology firms.

Because of the potential for lengthy reviews, consumer technology companies have been reluctant to wade directly into territory regulated by the FDA. Apple, for example, has tended to partner with existing health researchers and companies such as DexCom Inc, a conventional medical device firm, for uses of their products that involve regulatory oversight.

But under President Donald Trump, the FDA has been moving to relax some of its requirements. The FDA in July created a pilot program that would pre-certify certain companies so that they have to submit less information before marketing a product.

The initial participants in the pilot program also included Samsung Electronics, Alphabet’s Verily biotech unit, Johnson & Johnson and Swiss biotech firm Roche AG, among others. The FDA said in a statement it was also considering whether companies in the pilot program “may not have to submit a product for premarket review in some cases.”

“Our method for regulating digital health products must recognize the unique and iterative characteristics of these products,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in the statement.

One major difference in the pilot program from existing regulations is that it will evaluate companies based on how well their software-design systems work, rather than looking at each product and its accompanying software individually.

“We are hopeful this will allow us to accelerate FDA regulated features and software development, bringing new capabilities that could positively impact health outcomes to market more quickly,” Fitbit CEO James Park said in a statement.
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The days of Twitter limiting messages to 140 characters, a signature of the social network since its launch in 2006, may be numbered.

Twitter said on Tuesday that it would begin a test with a random sample of users allowing them to send tweets that are as long as 280 characters, double the existing cap, in most languages around the world.

The San Francisco-based company has stood by its short messages as a defining characteristic – like chirps from a bird, which is the company logo – even as users found ways around the limit, such as posting photos of text.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Twitter said its emphasis on brevity would never change but that it had been wondering whether people could express themselves easily enough, hurting the service’s popularity.

“Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain,” Twitter project manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara said in the post.

The employees acknowledged some users may have an “emotional attachment” to the current limit.

News reports in January 2016 said that Twitter was running internal tests for longer tweets and considering a limit as high as 10,000 characters.

Though Twitter is ubiquitous in media because of frequent use by U.S. President Donald Trump and many celebrities, the company has struggled financially. For the second quarter, it reported a loss of $116 million and zero growth in the number of users, at 328 million people. Facebook Inc has 2 billion users.

A higher character limit was inspired by how people use Twitter when writing in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the company said.

Characters in those languages can often express more than Roman characters can, meaning those users already, in effect, have a higher limit. They also use Twitter more often.

“In all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting,” the two employees wrote.

The test of 280 characters will run for an unspecified number of weeks in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Twitter said. The company declined to say how many people would be included in the test.

The 140-character limit originated from the use of SMS text messages. Twitter’s founders, including Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, wanted a limit just below the SMS cap of 160 characters.
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A coalition of businesses including Amazon, Google and General Motors has agreed to give $300 million to boost K-12 computer science programs across the U.S.

Internet Association CEO Michael Beckerman announced Tuesday that the private-sector contribution will come in over the next five years. Beckerman led a panel discussion at a downtown Detroit high-rise that featured President Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump.

Her visit to Detroit came a day after the president announced a plan to spend at least $200 million annually on competitive grants so schools can broaden access to computer science education.

“Knowing how to code is really foundational toward success in any industry, not just tech narrowly defined,” Ivanka Trump said.

Just before Ivanka Trump arrived on stage, Beckerman announced the private-sector contribution.

Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.org are giving $50 million apiece; Lockheed Martin is promising $25 million; Accenture is committing more than $10 million; and General Motors and Pluralsight have pledged $10 million toward the effort. Additionally, Detroit-based Quicken Loans announced that it will work to make sure that 15,000 Detroit Public Schools students receive computer science training.

Ivanka Trump said it is crucial that young people, especially girls and racial minorities, learn how to write computer code and study computer science.

“We have to do better. We are going to do better, and this is a giant leap forward in that direction,” she said during the panel discussion, which also included Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans; Hadi Partovi, CEO of Code.org; Rob Acker, CEO of Salesforce.org; and Marillyn Hewson, CEO of Lockheed Martin.

Gilbert said teaching schoolchildren computer science “isn’t one of these things where maybe this will work.

“This is the answer. This is flat-out the answer,” said Gilbert, who also owns the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA.
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