Jerry Merryman, one of the inventors of the handheld electronic calculator who is described by those who knew him as not only brilliant but also kind with a good sense of humor, has died. He was 86.

Merryman died Feb. 27 at a Dallas hospital from complications of heart and kidney failure, said his stepdaughter, Kim Ikovic. She said he’d been hospitalized since late December after experiencing complications during surgery to install a pacemaker. 

He’s one of the three men credited with inventing the handheld calculator while working at Dallas-based Texas Instruments. The team was led by Jack Kilby, who made way for today’s computers with the invention of the integrated circuit and won the Nobel Prize, and also included James Van Tassel. The prototype they built is at the Smithsonian Institution. 

“I have a Ph.D. in material science and I’ve known hundreds of scientists, professors, Nobel prize-winners and so on. Jerry Merryman was the most brilliant man that I’ve ever met. Period. Absolutely, outstandingly brilliant,” said Vernon Porter, a former TI colleague and friend. “He had an incredible memory and he had an ability to pull up formulas, information, on almost any subject.”

‘Electronic revolution’

Another former TI colleague and friend, Ed Millis, said, “Jerry did the circuit design on this thing in three days, and if he was ever around, he’d lean over and say, `and nights.”‘ 

Merryman told NPR’s “All Things Considered” in 2013, “It was late 1965 and Jack Kilby, my boss, presented the idea of a calculator. He called some people in his office. He says, we’d like to have some sort of computing device, perhaps to replace the slide ruler. It would be nice if it were as small as this little book that I have in my hand.”

Merryman added, “Silly me, I thought we were just making a calculator, but we were creating an electronic revolution.”

The Smithsonian says that the three had made enough progress by September 1967 to apply for a patent, which was subsequently revised before the final application in June 1974.

Born in Texas

Merryman was born near the small city of Hearne in Central Texas on June 17, 1932. By the age of 11 or so he’d become the radio repairman for the town.

“He’d scrap together a few cents to go to the movies in the afternoons and evenings and the police would come get him out … because their radios would break and he had to fix them,” said Merryman’s wife, Phyllis Merryman.

He went to Texas A&M University in College Station but didn’t finish. Instead, he went to work in the university’s department of oceanography and meteorology and before long was on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico measuring the force of hurricane winds. He started at Texas Instruments in 1963, at the age of 30.

Telescope motor

His friends and family say he was always creating something. His daughter Melissa Merryman recalls him making his own tuner for their piano. Friend and former colleague Gaynel Lockhart remembers a telescope in concrete at his home with a motor attached that would allow it to follow a planet throughout the night.

Despite his accomplishments, he was humble. “He wouldn’t ever boast or brag about himself, not ever,” said Melissa Merryman, who became stepsisters with her friend Kim Ikovic when they set up their parents, who got married in 1993.

Jerry Merryman retired from TI in January 1994, the company said.

“He always said that he didn’t care anything about being famous, if his friends thought he did a good job, he was happy,” Phyllis Merryman said. 
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A video clip shot on a sparse rooftop of what looks like a low-rise apartment block shows a young Indian man swaying while lip-syncing a song praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Describing himself as a proud Indian with the online identity “garrytomar”, he is wearing ear-studs and shows a beaded necklace under a partly unbuttoned shirt in the 15-second clip.

“Modi has single-handedly trounced everyone … Modi is a storm, you all now know,” goes the Hindi song, posted on Chinese video mobile application TikTok, the latest digital platform to grip India’s small towns and villages ahead of a general election due by May.

Created by Beijing Bytedance Technology, one of the world’s most valuable start-ups potentially worth more than $75 billion, TikTok allows users to create and share short videos with various special effects. It is becoming hugely popular in rural India, home to most of the country’s 1.3 billion people.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, its unit WhatsApp and Twitter are extensively being used by Indian politicians for campaigning ahead of the election: Facebook’s 300 million users and WhatsApp’s 200 million have made India their largest market in the world, while Twitter too has millions of users.

TikTok is fast catching up: it has been downloaded more than 240 million times in India so far, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower. More than 30 million users in India installed it last month, 12 times more than in January 2018.

“Most urban elites haven’t heard of TikTok and those who have, tend to view it as a platform for trivial content. In reality, it hosts diverse content including a fair share of political speech,” said Kailas Karthikeyan, a New Delhi-based technology analyst who has tracked TikTok for nine months.

TikTok’s video-only interface makes it less elaborate and easier to use compared to platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, making it a bigger attraction in rural India, he added.

Political interest

While Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress party have not officially joined TikTok, videos tagged #narendramodi have received more than 30 million views and those about Congress chief Rahul Gandhi (#rahulgandhi) have got nearly 13 million hits. Total views for political videos is far higher.

Amit Malviya, the BJP’s chief of information technology, said the party was tracking TikTok conversations and it was “abrilliant medium for creative expression”. The party, however, has no plans as of now to officially join the platform, he said.

A Congress source said the party was exploring joining TikTok and assessing how it could be used to better reach out to people in rural areas in the run-up to the election.

Not all political videos on TikTok seek votes. Some videos show people waving the Congress flag on Indian streets. Another clip shows Modi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a stage, with a Hindi-language rustic voiceover of her saying she will marry the Indian leader.

“I would die with him and live with him,” the Merkel voice impersonator declares in the video.

In another TikTok post, Modi fan Yogesh Saini says the prime minister is his world, moments before opening his jacket toreveal a video of Modi on his chest.

Saini, 23, isn’t affiliated to any political party, but says: “It’s my job to support Modi-ji, so I’m doing that,” using the honorific Indian suffix. He spoke to Reuters from the small town of Sawai Madhopur in the desert state of Rajasthan.

Scrutiny, backlash

Jokes, dance clips and videos related to India’s thriving movie industry dominate the platform. #Bollywood tagged videos have nearly 13 billion views and the app is also flooded with memes, as well as videos on cooking.

TikTok, though, is facing opposition from some quarters.

The information technology minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, M. Manikandan, said he will urge the federal government to ban the app as some content was “very unbearable.”

“Young girls and everybody is behaving very badly. Sometimes the body language is very bad, and (people are) doing mimicry of political leaders very badly,” Manikandan told Reuters.

A Hindu nationalist group close to Modi’s BJP too has called for a ban on TikTok.

TikTok said it respects local laws and there was “no basis” for the concerns. Promoting a safe and positive in-app environment was its “top priority,” it said.

The backlash comes as social media companies face increased scrutiny from authorities over fake news and undesirable content ahead of the polls. A federal proposal will mandate them to swiftly remove “unlawful” content when asked.

A senior government official in New Delhi said the government wants TikTok to comply with the new Indian regulations as and when they kick in, but there wasn’t any immediate concern on content.

Still, the government has asked the Chinese company to have better checks in place to ensure its users are aged above 12, which is recommended by the app itself, the official said.

 
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Facebook says it will not allow foreign-funded advertisements for an upcoming presidential election in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, hoping to allay concerns that its platform is being used to manipulate voting behavior.

The announcement on Facebook’s website said the restriction in Indonesia took effect Monday morning and is part of “safeguarding election integrity on our platform.”

Facebook and other internet companies are facing increased scrutiny over how they handle private user data and have been lambasted for not doing enough to stop misuse of their platforms by groups trying to sway elections. Critics say foreign interests, and Russia in particular, used Facebook to harvest private data and disseminate paid ads that may have influenced the outcomes of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the U.K. referendum on leaving the European Union.

Indonesia votes for president on April 17. The campaign pits incumbent leader Joko Widodo against ultranationalist former Gen. Prabowo Subianto, who was narrowly defeated by Widodo in 2014.

The social media company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp and has about 2.3 billion users for its Facebook site alone, said it’s using a mix of automated and human intervention to identify foreign-funded election ads.

It said the restriction applies to any ads coming from an advertiser based outside of the country “if it references politicians or political parties or attempts to encourage or suppress voting.”

The company said it had also prohibited foreign-funded advertisements for Nigeria’s elections in February and for Ukraine’s elections later this month.

For upcoming elections for the European Parliament and India, it has said advertisers will need to be authorized to buy political ads and a new tool will provide information about an ad’s budget, the number of people it reached and demographics about who saw the ad, including age, gender and location.
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As the global race to gain the lead in next generation tech heats up, China is stepping up its efforts, recently announcing a long-awaited plan to link up its southern Pearl River Delta into a massive hub of technology, research finance and innovation.

The possibilities and challenges of the project are both equally challenging and promising, analysts say.

Some describe the plan as an attempt to create a mega-city to rival Silicon Valley, the U.S. technology powerhouse that is home to companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple.

But while Silicon Valley has a population of 3.1 million and covers an area 121.4 square kilometers, the Greater Bay Area will link up nine cities together with Hong Kong and Macau and cover an area of 56,000 square kilometers. The area will have a population of about 70 million and the economic heft, state media argues, to drive the Chinese economy, let alone the world.

According to the plan, which was announced recently and is expected to be a prominent topic during high-level political meetings this month in Beijing, each city will focus on an area of strength. For example, Hong Kong will focus on finance, Macau tourism, Shenzhen, innovation and technology, Guangzhou will be a gateway and logistic hub and so on.

The plan is not necessarily new. China’s opening up to the world more than four decades ago began in the south and the Pearl River Delta has long been home to some of the country’s leading companies from telecommunications – such as Huawei to Internet giant Tencent and host of other technology and manufacturing enterprises.

“It’s (the plan) a natural evolution of economic growth and the growth engine,” said Adam Xu, partner at OC&C Strategy Consultants. “If you really look at history in China, a lot of top down plans always have some bottom up support. A lot of economic activity has already happened there, then you have a grand plan to first officially recognize, then to promote and to further accelerate.”

Xu said that as labor costs rise in China, the country is looking to move up the industrial value chain and the program seeks to do just that to push the region on to the next wave, be it the manufacturing of electric cars, financial services or telecommunications.

It also aims to drive investment to the area at a time when foreign funds flowing into the country are sagging.

Challenges

One key challenge, Xu adds, will be execution. The plan will tie together three different legal jurisdictions and that makes the plan unique compared to the two other major mega-city projects in China – the Beijing, Hebei, Tianjin merger and the Yangtze River Delta integration plan near Shanghai.

“We don’t know how effective the top down grand plan will (be in) guiding the many independent growing forces at the city level to coordinate and be successful,” Xu said. “This part will be quite an important challenge.”

China has long had deep pockets when it comes to making investments that push forward technological advances. In many cases, however, that has led to overlaps in development and spending on technology and in turn oversupply.

“Looking at the grand scheme each city doesn’t have anything new,” said C.Y. Huang, partner of FCC Partners. “The biggest challenge and the biggest beauty – if they can pull it off – will be linking all of these together. 

One way the plan could do that is not just by lifting physical barriers, but the flow of people, information and money.

China has already taken major strides to overcome some of the physical obstacles such as linking Hong Kong with Guangzhou and Shenzhou by high-speed rail and its recent opening of the 55-kilometer Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge. 

But other barriers may prove to be a bigger challenge.

“I think it is really the barriers in systems that is the challenge. If they can really pull that off that will be a tremendous benefit and synergy in the long term,” Huang said.

At the same time, he added, we shouldn’t underestimate the social and political aspect of the challenges because we are talking about people.

“One is a communist country, and the other is a free society. Although they talk about one country two systems, still it is different,” Huang said.
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Studying engineering isn’t just about learning, it’s about using skills in the real world. But for biomechanical engineering students, it can be hard to get that real-world experience. However, students at the University of the District of Columbia are able to see how their schoolwork translates to helping people. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The first American commercially built-and-operated crew spacecraft in eight years docked successfully Sunday at the International Space Station.

There was, however, no crew aboard the spacecraft, just a test dummy named Ripley, in a nod to the lead character in the Alien movies.

The docking was carried out autonomously by the Crew Dragon capsule, as the three astronauts on board the International Space Station watched.

The Space X Crew Dragon capsule lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket early Saturday from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

The Dragon brought supplies and test equipment to the space station where it will spend five days as astronauts conduct tests and inspect the Dragon’s cabin.

NASA has awarded millions of dollars to Space X and Boeing to design and operate a capsule to launch astronauts into orbit from American soil some time this year.

It is not immediately clear whether that goal will be reached.

Space X is entrepreneur Elon Musk’s company. Musk is also the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla.

Currently, America relies on Russia to launch astronauts to the space station.

Russia charges about $80 million per ticket.

 
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With the U.S. and China still negotiating a trade deal, and ongoing concerns in the U.S. about China’s technology goals, Silicon Valley is caught between two superpowers. Michelle Quinn reports.
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Northern California is famous for many things, the sun, the surf, the wine, but it has also been infamous for its smog. Smog is a noxious collection of nitrogen and sulfur oxides, along with smoke and dirty particles, which all combine to form a foglike haze in the air. But some new technology is promising to turn a roof into an air cleaner. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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They call it the Trump effect.

Increased government scrutiny of Chinese investments in Silicon Valley has meant some deals are not getting done. Some aren’t even considered.

Usually eager for money and tantalized by the prospect of the Chinese market, startups are even declining Chinese investment.

After years of growing ties between China and Silicon Valley, the U.S. tech capital sees itself caught between Beijing and Washington over which country will win the competition to create the next generation of communication technologies.

“China’s innovation efforts are broad and deep,” said Michael Wessel, commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, at a recent congressional hearing. “China wants to be a global innovation leader and is doing all that it can legally and illegally to achieve its goals.”

​Flashpoint Huawei

Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company that is building a 5G network in countries around the world, remains a flashpoint. Its chief financial officer faces extradition to the United States from Canada on fraud charges.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week, U.S. and Huawei officials lobbied world leaders on whether Huawei should be trusted.

U.S. concerns about China and technology extend to the nation’s methods to achieve technology dominance, as outlined in Beijing’s Made in China 2025 plan.

In addition to subsidies for industry, and research and development, the U.S. says those methods include massive cyberhacking campaigns to steal corporate secrets, forced technology transfers to Chinese partners, and government policies that reward intellectual property theft.

WATCH: Silicon Valley Skeptical of Washington’s China Concerns

Increased scrutiny of Chinese investors

The U.S. government wants new barriers up because it believes some technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotics, are important to national security. But many in the tech industry see risks in new restrictions.

“By not working with China, not only do we have less access to information to what they are doing,” said Parag Khanna, author of “The Future Is Asian.” They will substitute us for more reliable partners and we will be cut out of the entire market.”

Tim Draper is a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who says he was the first U.S. venture capitalist to invest in Baidu, the Chinese technology firm.

“I think we should be open and sharing,” he said. “Both countries benefit so much by having a very open communication lane there. … I believe we have a problem that we are putting up barriers where they don’t benefit us.”

The race to build 5G

Chinese companies are racing to build 5G wireless communication networks around the world, which Washington says risks giving Beijing enormous opportunities for electronic surveillance.

The stakes make it hard to predict how the U.S. and China will come to an understanding. In the meantime, Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs have accepted for now a cooling-off period for cross-border investment.

The disconnect between Silicon Valley and Washington is hard to bridge, said Christian Brose, head of strategy at Anduril Industries, a Southern California tech company that works with the U.S. government.

“When you have a conversation where one party sees China as an emerging national security challenge, and the other sees it as an emerging business opportunity, that’s just a fundamental clash of cultures and expectations that is difficult to reconcile, but I also think it’s not impossible,” he added.

While the two countries negotiate, Silicon Valley, caught in the middle, waits.
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America’s newest capsule for astronauts rocketed Saturday toward the International Space Station on a high-stakes test flight by SpaceX.

The only passenger was a life-size test dummy, named Ripley after the lead character in the “Alien” movies. SpaceX needs to nail the debut of its crew Dragon capsule before putting people on board later this year.

This latest, flashiest Dragon is on a fast track to reach the space station Sunday morning, just 27 hours after liftoff.

Five day round trip

It will spend five days docked to the orbiting outpost, before making a retro-style splashdown in the Atlantic next Friday — all vital training for the next space demo, possibly this summer, when two astronauts strap in.

“This is critically important … We’re on the precipice of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil again for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. He got a special tour of the pad on the eve of launch, by SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk.

An estimated 5,000 NASA and contractor employees, tourists and journalists gathered in the wee hours at Kennedy Space Center with the SpaceX launch team, as the Falcon 9 rocket blasted off before dawn from the same spot where Apollo moon rockets and space shuttles once soared. Across the country at SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, company employees went wild, cheering every step of the way until the capsule successfully reached orbit.

Looking on from Kennedy’s Launch Control were the two NASA astronauts who will strap in as early as July for the second space demo, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken. It’s been eight years since Hurley and three other astronauts flew the last space shuttle mission, and human launches from Florida ceased.

Private companies

NASA turned to private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, and has provided them $8 billion to build and operate crew capsules to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. Now Russian rockets are the only way to get astronauts to the 250-mile-high outpost. Soyuz tickets have skyrocketed over the years; NASA currently pays $82 million per seat.

Boeing aims to conduct the first test flight of its Starliner capsule in April, with astronauts on board possibly in August.

Bridenstine said he’s confident that astronauts will soar on a Dragon or Starliner, or both, by year’s end. But he stressed there’s no rush.

“We are not in a space race,” he said. “That race is over. We went to the moon and we won. It’s done. Now we’re in a position where we can take our time and make sure we get it right.”
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White House officials are worried that unless more American students study math and science the United States won’t be able to compete with China, India and other nations. The U.S. administration has just published a five-year plan to boost the number of kids who go into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM subjects. VOA’s Sahar Majid has more in this report narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
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YouTube said Thursday it will disable user comments on a broad array of videos featuring children to thwart “predatory behavior” after revelations about a glitch exploited for sharing of child pornography.

The Google-owned video sharing service announced further steps to crack down on inappropriate comments a week after an investigation showing how comments and connections on child porn were being displayed alongside innocuous videos.

“We recognize that comments are a core part of the YouTube experience and how you connect with and grow your audience,” YouTube said in a posted message to creators.

“At the same time, the important steps we’re sharing today are critical for keeping young people safe.”

YouTube said that during the past week it has suspended comments on tens of millions of videos to prevent users from exploiting of the software glitch for nefarious purposes.

“These efforts are focused on videos featuring young minors and we will continue to identify videos at risk over the next few months,” YouTube said.

“Over the next few months, we will be broadening this action to suspend comments on videos featuring young minors and videos featuring older minors that could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior.”

A small number of video creators will be allowed to keep comments enabled, but will be required to carefully moderate commentary and to deploy software tools provided by YouTube, according to Google.

YouTube accelerated the release of an improved “classifier” that it said will detect and remove twice the number of policy-breaking comments by individuals.

‘Wormhole’

A YouTube creator last week revealed what he called a “wormhole” that allowed comments and connections on child porn alongside videos.

Shortly thereafter, YouTube deleted many comments and blocked some accounts and channels showing inappropriate comments.

Matt Watson, a YouTube creator with some 26,000 subscribers, revealed the workings of what he termed a “wormhole” into a pedophile ring that allowed users to trade social media contacts and links to child porn in YouTube comments.

The post by Watson sparked a series of news reports and boycotts of YouTube ads from major firms.

The incident raised fears of a fresh “brand safety” crisis for YouTube, which lost advertisers last year following revelations that messages appeared on channels promoting conspiracy theories, white nationalism and other objectionable content.
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