Security guard Eric Leon watches the Knightscope K5 security robot as it glides through the mall, charming shoppers with its blinking blue and white lights. The brawny automaton records video and sounds alerts. According to its maker, it deters mischief just by making the rounds.

Leon, the all-too-human guard, feels pretty sure that the robot will someday take his job.

“He doesn’t complain,” Leon says. “He’s quiet. No lunch break. He’s starting exactly at 10.”

Even in the technology hotbed stretching from Silicon Valley to San Francisco, a security robot can captivate passers-by. But the K5 is only one of a growing menagerie of automated novelties in a region where you can eat a delivered pizza made via automation and drink beers at a bar served by an airborne robot. This summer, the San Francisco Chronicle published a tech tourism guide listing a dozen or so places where tourists can observe robots and automation in action.

Yet San Francisco is also where workers were the first to embrace mandatory sick leave and fully paid parental leave. Voters approved a $15 hourly minimum wage in 2014, a requirement that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law for the entire state in 2016. And now one official is pushing a statewide “tax” on robots that automate jobs and put people out of work.

It’s too soon to say if the effort will prevail, let alone whether less-progressive jurisdictions might follow suit. The tussle points to the tensions that can flare when people embrace both technological innovation and a strong brand of social consciousness.

Such frictions seem destined to escalate as automation makes further inroads into the workplace. One city supervisor, Norman Yee, has proposed barring food delivery robots from city streets, arguing that public sidewalks should be solely for people.

“I’m a people person,” Yee says, “so I tend to err on the side of things that should be beneficial and safe for people.” 

Future for workers

Jane Kim, the city supervisor who is pushing the robot tax, says it’s important to think now about how people will earn a living as more U.S. jobs are lost to automation. After speaking with experts on the subject, she decided to launch a statewide campaign with the hope of bringing revenue-raising ideas to the state legislature or directly to voters.

“I really do think automation is going to be one of the biggest issues around income inequality,” Kim says.

It makes sense, she adds, that the city at the center of tech disruption take up the charge to manage that disruption.

“It’s not inherently a bad thing, but it will concentrate wealth, and it’s going to drive further inequity if you don’t prepare for it now,” she says.

“Preposterous” is what William Santana Li, CEO of security robot maker Knightscope calls the supervisor’s idea. His company created the K5 robot monitoring the Westfield Valley Fair mall in San Jose.

The private security industry, Li says, suffers from high turnover and low pay. As he sees it, having robots handle menial tasks allows human guards to assume greater responsibilities — like managing a platoon of K5 robots — and likely earn more pay in the process.

Li acknowledges that such jobs would require further training and some technological know-how. But he says people ultimately stand to benefit. Besides, Li says, it’s wrong to think that robots are intended to take people’s jobs.

“We’re working on 160 contracts right now, and I can maybe name two that are literally talking about, `How can I get rid of that particular human position?”‘

Spurring new jobs

The question of whether — or how quickly — workers will be displaced by automation ignites fierce debate. It’s enough to worry Bill Gates, who suggested in an interview early this year a robot tax as a way to slow the speed of automation and give people time to prepare. The Microsoft co-founder hasn’t spoken publicly about it since.

A report last year from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that 9 percent of jobs in the United States — or about 13 million — could be automated. Other economists argue that the impact will be much less drastic.

The spread of automation should also generate its own jobs, analysts say, offsetting some of those being eliminated. Workers will be needed, for example, to build and maintain robots and develop the software to run them.

Technological innovation has in the past created jobs in another way, too: Work involving new technologies is higher-skilled and typically higher-paying. Analysts say that much of the extra income those workers earn tends to be spent on additional goods and services, thereby creating more jobs.

“There are going to be a wider array of jobs that will support the automation economy,” said J.P. Gownder, an analyst at the research firm Forrester. “A lot of what we’re going to be doing is working side by side with robots.”

What about people who lose jobs to automation but can’t transition to more technologically demanding work?

Lawmakers in Hawaii have voted to explore the idea of a universal basic income to guarantee wages to servers, cooks and cleaners whose jobs may be replaced by machines. Kim, the San Francisco supervisor, is weighing the idea of using revenue from a robot tax to supplement the low wages of people whose jobs can’t be automated, like home health care aides.

Doug Bloch, political director of Teamsters Joint Council 7 in Northern California and northern Nevada, said there have been no mass layoffs among hotel, trucking or food service staff resulting from automation. But that day is coming, he warns.

Part of his responsibility is to make sure that union drivers receive severance and retraining if they lose work to automation.

“All the foundations are being built for this,” he says. “The table is being set for this banquet, and we want to make sure our members have a seat at the table.”

Innovation ‘moves the world forward’

Tech companies insist their products will largely assist, and not displace, workers. Savioke, based in San Jose, makes 3-foot-tall (91 centimeter) robots — called Relay — that deliver room service at hotels where only one person might be on duty at night. This allows the clerk to stay at the front desk, said Tessa Lau, the company’s “chief robot whisperer.”

“We think of it as our robots taking over tasks but not taking over jobs,” Lau says. “If you think of a task as walking down a hall and waiting for an elevator, Relay’s really good at that.”

Similarly, friends Steve Simoni, Luke Allen and Gregory Jaworski hatched the idea of a drink-serving robot one night at a crowded bar in San Francisco. There was no table service. But there was a sea of thirsty people.

“We all wanted another round, but you have to send someone to leave the conversation and wait in line at the bar for 10 minutes and carry all the drinks back,” Allen says.

They created the Bbot, a box that slides overhead on a fixed route at the Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, bringing drinks ordered by smartphone and poured by a bartender — who still receives a tip. The bar is in Kim’s district in the South of Market neighborhood.

Simoni says the company is small and it couldn’t shoulder a government tax. But he’s glad policymakers are preparing for a future with more robots and automation.

“I don’t know if we need to tax companies for it, but I think it’s an important debate,” he says.

As for his trio, he says: “We’re going to side with innovation every time. Innovation is what moves the world forward.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Here’s a statistic for you to consider: the U.N. estimates that over 30 percent of the food that is produced every year never gets eaten. Now one enterprising Nigerian entrepreneur has built an app to help get some of that food to those who need it. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

A rock and roll fan with a penchant for harmony and obtuse references, Walter Becker, the guitarist, bassist and co-founder of the 1970s rock group Steely Dan, which sold more than 40 million albums and produced such hit singles as “Reelin’ In the Years,” “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” and “Deacon Blues” died Sunday. He was 67.

His official website announced his death Sunday with no further details.

Donald Fagen said in a statement Sunday that his Steely Dan bandmate was not only “an excellent guitarist and a great songwriter” but also “smart as a whip,” “hysterically funny” and “cynical about human nature, including his own.”  

“I intend to keep the music we created together alive as long as I can with the Steely Dan band,” Fagen wrote.

Becker had been sidelined

Although Steely Dan had been touring recently, Becker had missed performances earlier in the summer in Los Angeles and New York. Fagen later told Billboard that Becker was recovering from a procedure. Fagen said at the time he hoped that Becker would be fine soon.

Musicians were quick to mourn Becker on social media Sunday. Mark Ronson tweeted that Becker was “one half of the team I aspire to every time I sit down at a piano.”

Both Ryan Adams and the band The Mountain Goats tweeted that Becker changed their lives. Slash posted a photo of Becker on Instagram, writing “RIP (hash)WalterBecker.”

Started with saxophone

A Queens native who started out playing the saxophone and eventually picked up the guitar, Becker met Fagen as a student at Bard College in 1967.

“We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a mouldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm,” Fagen recalled in his statement. “We liked a lot of the same things: jazz (from the twenties through the mid-sixties), W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, science fiction, (Vladimir) Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films come to mind. Also soul music and Chicago blues.”

They played with the 1960s pop group Jay and the Americans and penned the song “I Mean to Shine,” performed by Barbara Streisand in 1971 before moving to California and founding the band, which they named after a sex toy in William S. Burroughs’ 1959 novel “Naked Lunch.”

“Like a lot of kids from fractured families, he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people’s hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art,” Fagen recalled.

First album in 1972

Their first album as Steely Dan, “Can’t Buy Me a Thrill” was released in 1972, and featured both “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ In the Years.” A lukewarm Rolling Stone review from the time said it contained “three top-level cuts and scattered moments of inspiration.”

The band continued producing albums throughout the 1970s, Boasting songs penned by Fagen and Becker and music provided by some of the best session musicians in the business.

“It wouldn’t bother me at all,” Becker said in an interview, “not to play on my own album.”

In their music, Steely Dan offered an idiosyncratic combination of rock and jazz, backed with subversive and literary lyrics that neither expected many fans to understand — and which they themselves sometimes claimed to not understand. They scored a big hit with “Rikki Don’t Lose that Number” in 1974 before hitting a high point in 1977 with the album “Aja.”

‘Musical antiheroes’

“What underlies Steely Dan’s music — and may, with this album, be showing its limitations — is its extreme intellectual self-consciousness, both in music and lyrics,” wrote critic Michael Duffy in Rolling Stone in 1977 of the album. “Given the nature of these times, this may be precisely the quality that makes Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.”

But it wasn’t quite enough to sustain Steely Dan past their next studio album, “Gaucho.” They broke up in 1981 after the album’s release.

Becker had suffered some personal hardships during this time, including addiction, his girlfriend’s death by overdose and a resulting lawsuit, and a serious injury he sustained after being struck by a cab. When Steely Dan disbanded, Becker retreated to Maui and began growing avocados, while Fagen attempted a solo career.

Honored in 2001

Becker eventually reunited with Fagen and, after a nearly 20 year hiatus, released two albums: “Two Against Nature,” which won four Grammys, including album of the year in 2001, and “Everything Must Go.” 

They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Ever sardonic and ornery, when they got back together and started touring again, Becker joked in an NPR interview that they were going to be wearing defibrillator backpacks during their performances just in case something went wrong.

When the interviewer asked about bands touring past their prime, Becker just said: “People were already thinking that about us in the `70s. It would be a shame if they didn’t continue to think that.”
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From: MeNeedIt

John Ashbery, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 90.

Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.

Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1975 collection, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” was the rare winner of the book world’s unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing “how we read poetry.”

Among a generation that included Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.

“No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,” Langdon Hammer wrote in The New York Times in 2008. “Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. ”

But to love Ashbery, it helped to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as “You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork” not to worry about their meaning. Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music.” Writer Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about.

“I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery,” it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people.”

Ashbery also was a highly regarded translator and critic. At various times, he was the art critic for The New York Herald-Tribune in Europe, New York magazine and Newsweek and the poetry critic for Partisan Review. He translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and numerous other French writers. He was a teacher for many years, including at Brooklyn College, Harvard University and Bard College.

Starting at boarding school, when a classmate submitted his work (without his knowledge) to Poetry magazine, Ashbery enjoyed a long and productive career, so fully accumulating words in his mind that he once told the AP that he rarely revised a poem once he wrote it down. More than 30 Ashbery books were published after the 1950s, including poetry, essays, translations and a novel, “A Nest of Ninnies,” co-written with poet James Schuyler.

His masterpiece was likely the title poem of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by a 16th century Italian painting of the same name. In 400-plus lines, Ashbery shifted from a critique of Parmigianino’s painting to a meditation on the besieged 20th century mind.

I feel the carousel starting slowly

And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,

Photographs of friends, the window and the trees

Merging in one neutral band that surrounds

Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

And I cannot explain the action of leveling,

Why it should all boil down to one

Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and remembered himself as a lonely and bookish child, haunted by the early death of his younger brother, Richard, and conflicted by his attraction to other boys. Ashbery grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, “The Battle,” written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he didn’t write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper.

Meanwhile, he took painting lessons and found new meaning in Life, the magazine. An article about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years. At Harvard University, he read W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore and met fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley. He would be grouped with O’Hara and Koch as part of the avant-garde “New York Poets” movement, although Ashbery believed what they really had in common was living in New York.

His first book, “Some Trees,” was a relatively conventional collection that came out in 1956, with a preface from Auden and the praise of O’Hara, who likened Ashbery to Wallace Stevens. But in 1962, he unleashed “The Tennis Court Oath,” poems so abstract that critic John Simon accused him of crafting verse without “sensibility, sensuality or sentences.” Ashbery later told the AP that parts of the book “were written in a period of almost desperation” and because he was living in France at the time, he had fallen “out of touch with American speech, which is really the kind of fountainhead of my poetry.”

“I actually went through a period after ‘The Tennis Court Oath’ wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it,” he said. “And then I must have said to myself, ‘Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I’m not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.’”

His 1966 collection, “Rivers and Mountains,” was a National Book Award finalist that helped restore his standing and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” raised him to the pantheon. In 2011, he was given an honorary National Book Award for lifetime achievement and declared he was “quite pleased” with his “status in the world of writers.”

His style ranged from rhyming couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to President Warren Harding. As he aged, he became ever more sensitive to mortality and reputation. “How to Continue” was an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1960s and ’70s, a party turned tragic by the deadly arrival of AIDS, “a gale (that) came and said/it is time to take all of you away.”

Reflecting on his work, Ashbery boasted about “strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion,” but acknowledged that “I grew/To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew/Those few paces from the best.” In the poem “In a Wonderful Place,” published in the 2009 collection “Planisphere,” he offered a brief, bittersweet look back.

I spent years exhausting my good works

on the public, all for seconds

Time to shut down colored alphabets

flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It

draws like a rout. Or a treat.

 
…

From: MeNeedIt

The Grand Canyon — one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World — is one of nature’s most stunning creations.

Located in the southwestern state of Arizona, the majestic site has inspired adventurers, poets and painters for hundreds of years. Whether looking down from its massive rim or up from the rushing waters of the Colorado River, it’s easy to see how it got its name.

National parks traveler Mikah Meyer, who’s on a mission to see all 417 National Park Service sites, can see why.

“It’s grand! That’s the right word to use for it,” he said. “Because whether standing at the rim and overlooking it or being down on the river, you just get a sense of how massive the Grand Canyon is.

Shaped by millions of years of erosion, the distinctly colored canyon is 446 kilometers (277 miles) long and averages about 1,220 meters (4,000 feet) deep — the length of 11 football fields.

Unique geology

“What’s so unique is that you have all these layers of the earth that were once underground that have been uplifted and then eroded away so scientists can see millions and millions and millions of years of earth’s crust history,” he said.

Scientists and visitors both can explore the massive canyons by foot … and by boat.

Which is what Mikah did on an eight-day, 362 kilometer (225 mile) rafting trip on the Colorado River, courtesy of Grand Canyon Whitewater.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘glamping,’ but definitely, if you’re going to float down the Colorado River and be stuck in the Grand Canyon with no access to anything from the outside world, then this was a great way to do it!”

The Colorado River is a massive stretch of water that passes through seven states and has carved the land in four of them.

One of Mikah’s favorite experiences was a side trip to the Little Colorado River, a tributary just off the main river.

“What made this Little Colorado so special is that it was an almost baby blue, light blue-white color, and you see the moment where it converges with this dark gray Colorado River, and these two vastly different colors coming together.”

Mikah described how he and his fellow travelers, “who were mostly in their 50s,” were “giggling and laughing like 10-year-olds” as they hooked their feet under each other’s armpits so they could float down the Little Colorado in a chain.

The group also took turns standing under one of the river’s many waterfalls, which they could access from the front and through a narrow passageway from the back.

“It was just this amazing side trip that showed you the wonders of the Grand Canyon that are hidden deep within, that you won’t discover unless you go in it,” he said.

Nature’s roller coaster

And while there are places on the river where the water is still, and where you can see mist rising from naturally formed springs, the highlight for Mikah was navigating the whitewater rapids that the river is famous for, including Lava Falls, the scariest rapids in the park.

“It is one of three ‘10s’ in the Grand Canyon, meaning the most difficult to navigate for the guides and by and large considered the most epic of all the whitewater,” Mikah explained.

“So we’re all zipped up in rain jackets and rain gear because the water is actually really cold … and so when it hits you, it’s kind of a shock to the system…”

They were hit with several large waves.

“The first one kind of got everybody wet with a decent amount, and then the second wave felt like a brick wall hitting you … and there’s just this moment where everyone’s like ‘what just happened?’ and then everyone starts giggling and laughing and cheering and worrying and screaming because it’s just so much fun! You’re basically on a roller coaster except it’s a raft and you’re going through water and you don’t know what will happen next.”

“It’s not like a Disney-designed ride where you’re guaranteed to be safe,” Mikah added. “You could be thrown off the raft.

“There’s a great triumphant experience to say you conquered the biggest rapid of this 225-mile stretch … it was just a really magical moment.”

Still waters and magic

During calmer moments, visitors can also learn about the river’s rich history. The National Park Service describes on its website how people “have been part of Grand Canyon’s history and culture from 10,000 years ago through today.”

Based on archeological evidence, the park service explains that hunter gatherers “passed through the canyon 10,000 or more years ago. The ancestral Puebloan people have lived in and around the canyon for several thousand years, leaving behind dwellings, garden sites, food storage areas, and artifacts. Modern tribes still consider the Grand Canyon their homeland.”

During their river tour, Mikah and his fellow rafters had great views of historic Native American food storage granaries that have been carved into the canyon walls.

And there were opportunities to see some of the wildlife … like the endangered California condor, the largest flying bird in North America.

“They brought them to the Grand Canyon to try to provide a habitat that they thought would help them thrive and thus far it’s been doing pretty well,” Mikah said.

“It was just so many of these little side hikes and experiences that brought this group of mainly retired people to acting like children again, and I think that’s the magic of the Grand Canyon,” he added.

Glamping

In the evenings, Mikah and his group camped on the shore, where they had a chance to relax, put their feet into the water and enjoy hot meals like chicken fajitas and vegetables, specially prepared for them by their guides.

A perfect way to end each day in one of the world’s most beautiful — and natural — playgrounds.

“The world could have gone to nuclear war for all we would have known,” Mikah reflected. “It was just this amazing moment to truly be in nature, truly be void of the distractions of the world and enjoy that splendor of nature, enjoy the people you’re around in a way that is so rare today.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Officials in San Diego County have declared a public health emergency because of the spread of the liver disease hepatitis A.

Infections have killed 15 people and hospitalized nearly 400 more, with the homeless population hit hardest since the outbreak started last November.

The Union-Tribune reports that Friday’s emergency declaration helps the county request state assistance and gives legal protection for new sanitation measures.

Hand washing, street cleaning

Those measures include about 40 portable hand-washing stations for areas with concentrations of homeless. The virus lives in human feces and spreads if people who have used the bathroom don’t properly clean their hands.

Crews also plan to use bleach-spiked water for high-pressure washing to remove “all feces, blood, bodily fluids or contaminated surfaces,” according to a sanitation plan included in a letter delivered to San Diego city government Thursday.

In the coming weeks, other cities in the region will see hand-washing and street-sanitizing efforts, said Dr. Wilma Wooten, the region’s public health officer.

Preventative strategy not enough

To date, vaccination and education have been San Diego County’s main preventative strategy. Though thousands of doses of vaccine were distributed, infection rates have not slowed much, and death reports have accelerated in recent weeks.

The sanitation measures were inspired by a campaign in Los Angeles, home to tens of thousands of homeless.

“We know that L.A. has had no local cases of hepatitis A related to the strain that we’re seeing here in San Diego,” Wooten said. “If they’re doing it there and they haven’t had any cases, it could be beneficial here as well.”

The moves in San Diego follow finger pointing between city officials and their counterparts at the county level, with both sides insisting they were doing the best they could under tough circumstances, the newspaper said.

“There is no precedent for this,” Wooten said. “We will definitely have a playbook for if we have something like this in the future, but this is the first time we have had something of this nature happen.”
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From: MeNeedIt

The world of smart appliances capable of communicating with humans is slowly taking shape, thanks to the increasing popularity and ubiquity of so-called personal assistants. At the International Consumer Electronics Trade Show now being held in Berlin, manufacturers are promoting a new generation of gadgets from smart refrigerators to window cleaning robots. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

Floodwaters have inundated at least five highly contaminated toxic waste sites near Houston, raising concerns that the pollution there might spread.

The Associated Press visited the sites this past week, some of them still only accessible by boat.

Long a center of the American petrochemical industry, the Houston metro area has more than a dozen such Superfund sites, designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as being among the most intensely contaminated places in the country.

No immediate response

EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham could not immediately provide details on when agency experts would inspect the Houston-area sites. She said Friday that staff had checked on two other Superfund sites in Corpus Christi and found no significant damage.

“We will begin to assess other sites after flood waters recede in those areas,” Graham said.

Near the Highlands Acid Pit, across the swollen San Jacinto River from Houston, Dwight Chandler sipped beer and swept out the thick muck caked inside his devastated home. He worried whether Harvey’s floodwaters had also washed in pollution from the Superfund site just a couple blocks away.

In the 1950s, the pit was filled with toxic sludge and sulfuric acid from oil and gas operations. Though 22,000 cubic yards of hazardous waste and soil were excavated in the 1980s, the site is still considered a potential threat to groundwater, and EPA maintains monitoring wells there.

When he was growing up in Highlands, Chandler, now 62, said he and his friends used to swim in the by-then abandoned pit.

“My daddy talks about having bird dogs down there and to run and the acid would eat the pads off their feet,” he recounted Thursday. “We didn’t know any better.”

Superfund sites a priority

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has said cleaning up Superfund sites are a priority, even as he has taken steps to roll back or delay rules aimed at preventing air and water pollution. President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget seeks to cut money for the Superfund program by 30 percent, though congressional Republicans are likely to approve less severe reductions.

Like Trump, Pruitt has expressed skepticism about the predictions of climate scientists that warmer air and warmer seas will produce stronger, more drenching storms.

Under the Obama administration, the EPA conducted a nationwide assessment of the increased threat to Superfund sites posed by climate change, including rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes. Of the more than 1,600 sites reviewed as part of the 2012 study, 521 were determined to be in 1-in-100 year and 1-in-500 year flood zones. Nearly 50 sites in coastal areas could also be vulnerable to rising sea levels.

The threats to human health and wildlife posed by rising waters inundating Superfund sites varies widely depending on the specific contaminants and concentrations involved. But the EPA report specifically noted the risk that floodwaters might carry away and spread toxic materials over a wider area.

In Crosby, across the San Jacinto River from Houston, a small working-class neighborhood sits between two Superfund sites, French LTD and the Sikes Disposal Pits. The area was wrecked by Harvey’s floods, with only a single house from among the roughly dozen lining Hickory Lane still standing.

After the flood water receded on Friday, a sinkhole the size of a swimming pool had opened up and swallowed two cars. The acrid smell of creosote filled the air.

At the Brio Refining Inc. in Friendswood, the floodwaters had receded by Saturday. There was a layer of silt on the road leading to the Superfund site. The company operated a chemical reprocessing and refining facility there until the 1980s, leaving behind polluted soil and groundwater.

Completely underwater

The San Jacinto River Waste Pits Superfund site was completely covered by water when an AP reporter saw it Thursday. According to its website, the EPA was set to make a final decision this year about a proposed $97 million cleanup effort to remove toxic waste from a paper mill that operated there in the 1960s.

The flow from the raging river washing over the toxic site was so intense it damaged an adjacent section of the Interstate 10 bridge, which has been closed to traffic due to concerns it might collapse.

There was no way to immediately access how much contaminated soil from the site might have been washed away. According to an EPA survey from last year, soil from the former waste pits contains dioxins and other long-lasting toxins linked to birth defects and cancer.

Kara Cook-Schultz, who studies Superfund sites for the advocacy group TexPIRG, said environmentalists have warned for years about the potential for flooding to inundate Texas Superfund sites, particularly the San Jacinto Waste Pits.

“If floodwaters have spread the chemicals in the waste pits, then dangerous chemicals like dioxin could be spread around the wider Houston area,” Cook-Schultz said. “Superfund sites are known to be the most dangerous places in the country, and they should have been properly protected against flooding.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Sah Phon can live with some grief from his ancestral spirits.

The elderly villager abandoned them in Cambodia’s Stung Treng province in favor of a relocation package after learning his homeland would be swallowed by an enormous dam. But he’s confident they will forgive him.

“If we do something wrong, we pray in accordance with our traditions; for example [sacrificing] pigs and chickens for praying. And we pray so that we can be recovered,” he reasons.

Once a fisherman from Sre Kor village near the confluence of the Sre Pok and Se San rivers, Phon has watched as fish stocks have dwindled over the past few years.

Some blame the dam construction, others destructive techniques such as electro-fishing but all agree the population of fish is rapidly shrinking.

Relocation offer

So with his village set to be flooded and his primary source of income dead, Phon took a relocation offer early. He says he was the first.

The swift decision paid off. Phon struck out in a relocation lottery with a house right next to the entrance road of Kbal Romeas Thmey (New Kbal Romeas).

He built up a business selling household wares in the prime location and says he’s doing fine.

“It’s different because it has a highway — an ASEAN highway,” he boasted as his grandson hooks bait to a line — practicing the skills of his grandfather’s dying profession. “Before I could not transport any goods. Now I can. The truck can get into our home to transport goods. Whatever I need, they can reach my home.”

Phon has been lucky, but there are only so many general stores one village can support and not many others are as enthusiastic about relocation.

That includes his brother, Sah Voeurn, who like thousands of ethnic minority villagers facing eviction, is pained by the prospect of abandoning a fundamentally different way of life.

“I really don’t want to live there. The situation is difficult, there’s not enough water. It’s mountain land and it’s rocky and sandy and very difficult to do agriculture,” he said.

Behind the rows of shiny blue new roofs at the relocation villages each family has a small plot of land. On the surface, the village looks quite nice.

Inadequate compensation

Away from the prying eyes of company representatives and local officials monitoring the area, many quietly complain that opportunities to generate income are scarce, the soil is poor and personal movements are heavily restricted.

Voeurn feels so strongly against relocation that he has traveled the long journey from Sre Kor to Kbal Romeas to join a community protest — a trip made harder by multiple police checkpoints attempting to restrict access to the area.

“The government is building the dam to get more income for the government, not for the villagers,” he said on the eve on a pig sacrifice with 50 Bunong families that are holding out and trying to stop the dam

The 400-megawatt Lower Se San II, which is Cambodia’s largest dam so far with a flood plain of 335 square kilometers, hasn’t just stirred controversy because of the roughly 4,000 families it will forcibly displace.

It has far wider implications for fish stocks, conservationists argue.

More than 9 percent of the fisheries for the entire Mekong river would be lost because of the Lower Se San II, according to a report in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Science.

Even an environmental impact assessment commissioned by the dam’s developers and approved by the Cambodian government in 2010 found the impacts on fish would be severe, as it would block migratory species.

The Ministry of Mines and Energy did not respond to multiple request to comment on the impact of the project.

With Cambodian’s energy demands predicted by some estimates to triple between 2012 and 2020 and supply already heavily reliant on imports, the government argues the more than $800-million project will supply much needed power to five provinces.

Debates rage about how this benefit stacks up economically against the loss of fish and impacts on water flow and quality.

What none of the arguments over figures can appreciate though is the value of a fundamentally different way of life, or whether affected villagers will attain a better standard of life by being dragged into the formal economy rather than living effectively off grid.

“The native people have a way of life opposite to mainstream people, native people consider nature as friend and don’t have a passion to own,” says Loek Sreyneang, a project officer at Cambodia Indigenous Youth Association.

The scores of families holding out want an audience with the government, but that has not been forthcoming.

So instead they have taken their case to the provincial court, arguing the development amounts to a systematic attack on indigenous people and thus a crime against humanity under Cambodian law.

That desperate final act will almost certainly have no impact and in weeks their houses will be underwater.

“I can feel their misery to leave from home, a fatherland which they have lived in for ages,” Loek Sreyneang lamented.
…

From: MeNeedIt

Floodwaters are beginning to recede around Houston, and although Hurricane Harvey has dissipated, the health problems have not. In fact, some are just beginning. 

Aerial views of Houston Friday showed that just about everything is under water. It’s what’s in and under that water that has public health workers concerned. More people could die after Harvey’s long gone than during the worst of the storm. Health officials are telling people to stay out of the water if possible, although it’s too late for many.

Downed power lines electrocuted at least two volunteer rescuers when their boat hit the power lines they couldn’t see. And a young man, Andrew Pasek, died after he stepped into electrified water in his family’s yard. Pasek and a friend went back to the family home to search for his sister’s cat. Jodelle Pasek, his mother, said her son’s last words were, “I’m dying,” as he warned the friend not to follow him.

WATCH: As Texas Flooding Recedes, Health Hazards Likely to Emerge

Tens of thousands of residents of Houston, the fourth most populous city in the U.S., fled their homes as the water continued to rise, many at a moment’s notice. Virginia Rogers Grasso, an elderly woman who was taken to the city’s convention center, which is now being used as a shelter, said she didn’t want to leave her home, but authorities told her it was mandatory and that her house “is fixing to be flooded.”

Medicines left behind

People with diabetes didn’t have time to collect lifesaving medications like insulin. Others left without blood pressure or cholesterol controlling drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local hospitals and pharmacies are helping out. Doctors have volunteered to help with routine medical care. 

Dr. Mehdi Ravazi, a cardiologist at Texas Heart Institute, told VOA that he went to the convention center to provide basic medical care. Ravazi said he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at the shelter.

Beyond flooding

But, with lots of water and daytime temperatures in the 30s (90s Fahrenheit), Dr. Samuel Dorevitch says Houston is a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes and bacteria. Dorevitch is an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois in Chicago who specializes in waterborne illnesses.

“The public health concerns following Hurricane Harvey go way beyond the immediate flooding and rainwater,” Dorevitch said. “The concerns extend to mosquitoes and the diseases they carry when standing water is available, especially in containers.”

Dorevitch also said people exposed to floodwater can develop multidrug-resistant staph infections. Photos and video of Texans in the flood zone show hundreds of people walking in water. Any cut could lead to a serious infection. And then there’s E.coli, bacteria that can also be deadly and is very likely in the floodwater.

“If wastewater treatment facilities are overwhelmed, there’s potential for sewage to get into the water,” Dorevitch said. “And then there’s the drinking water that comes out of the tap, which is threatened, as well, by flooding that’s limiting the activity at one of Houston’s drinking water treatment plants right now.”

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a statement saying it will test floodwater samples as well as drinking water and wastewater facilities. The agency is warning people not to drink or bathe with well water, which is commonly used in Texas. Even in homes, water that has flooded storage areas for pesticide or other products containing hazardous chemicals is not safe to walk in. The CDC is advising people who waded through floodwaters to get tetanus shots because the water can contain glass and sharp objects.

Mental health concerns

As the water recedes, mold and respiratory problems caused by mold can increase. Mold can grow in water-soaked walls, insulation, furniture and carpeting, even in ceilings where roofs leaked or were damaged during the storm.

The CDC said its Emergency Operations Center is now activated to bring together CDC staff to respond to public health needs and to send resources and personnel if requested. It has set up medical stations in Louisiana and in Texas. Those in Texas are now operational.

And finally, Dorevitch says, mental health is also a concern. It can be overlooked in the haste to get Houston and other cities running again, but the tragedy of losing everything and those who lost family members or friends can suffer lasting trauma. Much of the video coming from Texas shows people, young and old, weeping for the homes, family photos and the former lives they have lost.
…

From: MeNeedIt

The digital arms race between the United States and Russia appears to be accelerating, fueled in part by new comments by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin, speaking to a group of Russian students Friday, called artificial intelligence “not only Russia’s future” but “the future of the whole of mankind.”

“The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world,” he said. “There are colossal opportunities and threats that are difficult to predict now.”

Digital domain

Top U.S. intelligence officials have been warning of a “perpetual contest” between the United States and Russia, with much of it playing out in the digital domain.

The Defense Intelligence Agency in particular has sought to maximize its ability to make use of artificial intelligence, or AI, reaching out to private industry and academia to help maintain the U.S. advantage.

Russia and China are seen as key competitors in the digital space and have been working on how to apply technologies, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, to their war-fighting doctrines.

“They’ve got their heads wrapped around the idea that 21st century warfare is as much cognitive as it is kinetic,” outgoing DIA Director Lt.  Gen. Vincent Stewart told a small group of reporters from VOA and other organizations last month.

Top officials, both in government and in the private sector, have long been willing to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence and other technological advances.

But some analysts see Putin’s willingness to address the issue publicly as telling.

“[It’s] rare that you have a head of state discussing these issues,” said Frank Cilluffo, director of the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University. “He is sending a message.”

And Cilluffo hopes the U.S. is paying attention.

“A big space race is on, and it’s a race we can’t afford to lose,” he said.

US maintains advantage

Many experts say the U.S. still maintains an advantage over Russia in artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Still, as Russia, China and other countries seek additional breakthroughs in how to apply such technology, the stakes are high.

“It completely changes the game of warfare,” said David Kennedy, who served with the U.S. National Security Agency and with the Marine Corps’ electronic warfare unit.

“It’s no longer going to be about who has the most bombs or who has the better bombs,” he said. “It’s going to be who can apply these principles to respond faster to fight a war and win a war.”

And Kennedy, now chief executive officer at TrustedSec, an information technology security consulting firm, sees Russia gaining.

“They explore all options, and they have a substantial budget for it,” he said, noting that Moscow may have an advantage in how to apply the technology since it is willing to sidestep privacy and ethical concerns that the U.S. and even China have tried to address.

China, too, is making significant gains. But unlike Russia, China has focused more on quantum computing, launching a quantum satellite into space last year.

Quantum computing uses a quirk of physics that allows subatomic particles to simultaneously exist in two different states. As a result, a computer is then able to skip through much of the elaborate mathematical computations necessary to solve complex problems.

It is seen as a potentially game-changing tool for intelligence agencies, enabling them to hack encrypted messages from their adversaries while their own communications would be “hackproof,” if the technology can be perfected.

“The Chinese have one of the most powerful quantum encryption capabilities in the world,” DIA’s Stewart cautioned last month. “Whoever wins this space wins the game.”
…

From: MeNeedIt

When U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson returns to Earth on Saturday from the International Space Station, she will have spent more time in space than any other American.

Whitson will have logged 665 days in space over three separate missions, the equivalent of about one year and 10 months outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

The world record belongs to Russian Astronaut Gennady Padalka, who spent 879 days in space.

Whitson is scheduled to return to Earth Saturday night in Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz capsule. She will then travel to Germany before heading home to Houston, which is still crippled from Hurricane Harvey.

Whitson said in an email to the Associated Press that her home was not damaged in the storm. However, she said the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston was temporarily closed except for essential personnel, such as those staffing Mission Control for the space station mission.

“Any trepidations I might have about returning in the aftermath of a hurricane are entirely eclipsed by the all those folks keeping our mission going,” she said.

Whitson, a biochemist, began her third and latest mission on the International Space Station last November. During the mission, she performed a spacewalk and also become the first woman to command the space station twice.

She and the other crew members aboard the International Space Station also pursued hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science.

At 57, Whitson is the oldest woman to have been in space.

The astronaut has said she is unsure whether this most recent space mission will be her last.

NASA had scheduled a news conference earlier this week with Whitson, to be filmed from the space station, but said it had to be rescheduled after she returns because of the impact of Hurricane Harvey in Houston.
…

From: MeNeedIt