In Orlando, Florida this past week, 18,000 women from around the world gathered to talk about technology and how women can play a bigger role in shaping the industry’s future. VOA’s Michelle Quinn went to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the largest meeting of women in technology worldwide, to find out what women in tech want to change.
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Microsoft said Thursday that it would team up with communities in six U.S. states to invest in technology and related jobs in rural and smaller metropolitan areas.

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

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

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

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

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

Being ‘more present’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smith said the success of the program would be measured first by how it provided digital skills to students and then by the job creation, economic growth and “making a difference in the lives of real people.”
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As electric-powered cars are rapidly gaining popularity, the last frontier in private transportation is also opening up to alternative, eco-friendly power. Thanks to advances in battery and electric motor technology, several manufacturers are experimenting with light planes that are quiet, easy to maintain and cheap to fly. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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General Motors’s self-driving unit, Cruise Automation, has more than doubled the size of its test fleet of robot cars in California during the past three months, a GM spokesman said on Wednesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Skills will need to be updated

 

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

 

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

 

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

Few have lost jobs to automation

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

 

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

 

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

Self-driving cars

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual bomb disposal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shifting scenarios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:45 a.m.

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

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

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

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

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

10:30 a.m.

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

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

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

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

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

10 a.m.

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

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

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

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

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

Google’s voice-activated digital assistant will serves as the brains for all the speakers.
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Yahoo on Tuesday said that all 3 billion of its accounts were hacked in a 2013 data theft, tripling its earlier estimate of the size of the largest breach in history, in a disclosure that attorneys said sharply increased the legal exposure of its new owner, Verizon Communications.

The news expands the likely number and claims of class action lawsuits by shareholders and Yahoo account holders, they said. Yahoo, the early face of the internet for many in the world, already faced at least 41 consumer class-action lawsuits in U.S. federal and state courts, according to company securities filing in May.

John Yanchunis, a lawyer representing some of the affected Yahoo users, said a federal judge who allowed the case to go forward still had asked for more information to justify his clients’ claims.

“I think we have those facts now,” he said. “It’s really mind-numbing when you think about it.”

Yahoo said last December that data from more than 1 billion accounts was compromised in 2013, the largest of a series of thefts that forced Yahoo to cut the price of its assets in a sale to Verizon.

Yahoo on Tuesday said “recently obtained new intelligence” showed all user accounts had been affected. The company said the investigation indicated that the stolen information did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information.

But the information was protected with outdated, easy-to-crack encryption, according to academic experts. It also included security questions and backup email addresses, which could make it easier to break into other accounts held by the users.

Many Yahoo users have multiple accounts, so far fewer than 3 billion were affected, but the theft ranks as the largest to date, and a costly one for the internet pioneer.

Verizon in February lowered its original offer by $350 million for Yahoo assets in the wake of two massive cyber attacks at the internet company.

Some lawyers asked whether Verizon would look for a new opportunity to address the price.

“This is a bombshell,” said Mark Molumphy, lead counsel in a shareholder derivative lawsuit against Yahoo’s former leaders over disclosures about the hacks.

Verizon did not respond to a request for comment about any possible lawsuit over the deal.

Verizon, the likely main target of legal actions, also could be challenged as it launches a new brand, Oath, to link its Yahoo, AOL and Huffington Post internet properties.

In August in the separate lawsuit brought by Yahoo’s users, U.S. Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, ruled Yahoo must face nationwide litigation brought on behalf of owners accounts who said their personal information was compromised in the three breaches.

Yanchunis, the lawyer for the users, said his team planned to use the new information later this month to expanding its allegations.

Also on Tuesday, Senator John Thune, chairman of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, said he plans to hold a hearing later this month over massive data breaches at Equifax and Yahoo. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission already had been probing Yahoo over the hacks.

The closing of the Verizon deal, which was first announced in July, had been delayed as the companies assessed the fallout from two data breaches that Yahoo disclosed last year. The company paid $4.48 billion for Yahoo’s core business.

A Yahoo official emphasized Tuesday that the 3 billion figure included many accounts that were opened but that were never, or only briefly, used.

The company said it was sending email notifications to additional affected user accounts.

The new revelation follows months of scrutiny by Yahoo, Verizon, cybersecurity firms and law enforcement that failed to identify the full scope of the 2013 hack.

The investigation underscores how difficult it was for companies to get ahead of hackers, even when they know their networks had been compromised, said David Kennedy, chief executive of cybersecurity firm TrustedSEC LLC.

Companies often do not have systems in place to gather up and store all the network activity that investigators could use to follow the hackers’ tracks.

“This is a real wake up call,” Kennedy said. “In most guesses, it is just guessing what they had access to.”
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