Automakers from around the world take the stage this weekend at the 45th annual Tokyo Motor Show. Designers will showcase electronic cars with advanced artificial intelligence and at least one concept car with safety features for the world around it. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Facebook, Google and Twitter are heading to Washington to answer questions about how their services were used by Russia-based operatives to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In Silicon Valley, there’s concern that the scrutiny may bring new regulations, as VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.
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Police in Hawaii will ticket people who get caught looking at digital devices while crossing a street in the state capital, Honolulu.

The law, passed in July, came into effect this week, making Honolulu the first major city in the U.S. to pass such a law.

The only exemption to the Distracted Walking Law is to use a device to call 911 to report an emergency.

The fines for the offenses will range from $15 to up to $99 for repeat offenders.

Pedestrians are still allowed to talk on their phones while crossing the streets, as long as they look at their surroundings.

The National Safety Council added “distracted walking” to its annual list of injury risks in 2015.

According to a study in the Journal of Safety Studies in 2015, some 400 pedestrians distracted by a phone were injured in the United States each year between the years 2000 and 2007. But after the introduction of the smartphone, the numbers have risen. The study found an estimated 1,300 pedestrians were injured in 2012.
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Twitter is reporting a loss of $21.1 million in its third quarter, but turned in a better-than-expected profit when one-time charges and benefits are removed.

Shares of Twitter Inc. soared almost 9 percent before the opening bell Thursday.

The San Francisco company had a loss of 3 cents, but a gain of 10 cents if those non-re-occurring events are removed.  That’s 2 cents better than industry analysts had predicted, according to a survey by Zacks Investment Research.

Revenue was $589.6 million in the period, in line with expectations.
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Twitter is enacting new policies around hate, abuse and ads, but creating new rules is only half the battle – the easy half.

The bigger problem is enforcement, and there the company has had some high-profile bungles recently. That includes its much-criticized suspension of actress Rose McGowan while she was speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, and the company’s ban, later reversed, of a controversial ad by a Republican Senate candidate.

The twists and turns suggest that Twitter doesn’t always communicate the intent of its rules to the people enforcing them. The company says it will be clearer about these policies and decisions in the future.
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Robert Salazar has been playing with origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, since he was 8 years old. When he sees a sheet of paper, his imagination takes over and intricate animals take shape.

“Seeing the single uncut sheet, it has everything you need to create all of the origami that have ever been folded. It is all in the single sheet so there is endless potential,” Salazar said.

The endless potential of origami, folding a single sheet of paper into an intricate sculpture, reaches all the way to space.

Salazar’s 17-year experience with origami is appreciated at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a contractor and intern, Salazar is helping create objects that may one day be used in space exploration.

“Origami offers the potential to take a very large structure, even a vast structure, and you can get it to fit within the rocket, go up, then deploy back out again. So it greatly magnifies what we are capable of building in space,” Salazar said.

Folding a large object into a relatively small space is not a simple task.

“A big challenge in origami design in general is that because all of these folds share a single resource, which is a single sheet … everything is highly interdependent, so if you change just one feature it has an impact on everything else,” Salazar said.

“One of our guide stars really is keep it as simple as can be,” said Manan Arya, a technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Don’t add unnecessary complexity because every piece of complexity, every piece of hardware you add, that ends up being another potential point of failure.”

Starshade

Folding an object the size of a baseball diamond so that it could fit into a rocket is the goal of a NASA project called Starshade.

Once it opens in space, Starshade would allow a space telescope to better see the planets around bright stars.

“Seeing an exoplanet next to its parent star is like trying to image a firefly next to a search light, the searchlight being the star,” said Arya, who is  working on the Starshade project. “Starshade seeks to block out that starlight so you can image a really faint exoplanet right next to it.”

Origami robot

Origami is also used in designing a robot called the Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot, or PUFFER. It has a body that can fold itself flat and roll under small spaces. PUFFER has been tested on desert terrains and snowy slopes. It may one day end up on a mission to another planet.

“It [PUFFER] is to explore environments otherwise inaccessible to a robot that could not fold itself to fit inside these cracks, [to] explore cave systems, could be other planets, even on our own,” Salazar said.

Origami antenna

Another application for space origami design is to pack an antenna into satellites the size of a briefcase, called CubeSats.

“The bigger the antenna you have, the more gain your antenna has, so it is useful to have a big antenna that gets packaged into this tiny space that unfolds out to be a large antenna. The biggest CubeSat antennas right now are about half a meter,” Arya said.

Unexplored territory

There are also largely unexplored surfaces that can utilize origami concepts in designing new technologies.

“So often, origami design has been tailored toward materials that are already lying flat,” Salazar said. “But there is actually a vastly, a much larger field of application for which the surfaces are not flat, so they could be parabolic. They could be spherical. They could be many combinations of doubly curved surfaces coming together. All of these things can also be folded.”

In the current origami-inspired technologies being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is a graceful beauty to the folding and unfolding of designs such as the Starshade, which unfurls into what looks like a sunflower. In origami, Salazar said, art, science and engineering are only superficially different.

“Really, when it comes down to it, you’re looking at the world,” he said. “You’re making observations. You’re finding patterns in these observations. [You’re] developing an understanding of what you see, then using that understanding to create. And when you’re creating, [it] can either be creating with the intention of solving a physical problem or it could be nonphysical. It could be aesthetic. You’re trying to find a particular impact on people when they see your work. So really, the practice is the same.”

In origami, Salazar said art, science and engineering are quite similar. They draw on making observations and creating something that produces an impact.
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Paper folding known as origami is widely considered a Japanese art form. From a single piece of paper, an animal, a flower or even a boat can take shape. Besides the fun and artistic side of origami, the art of paper folding also has applications that can take it to outer space. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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U.S. President Donald Trump Wednesday ordered the Transportation Department to launch a test program to increase the number of drones for commercial and civil use.

“The program will help tackle the most significant challenges in integrating drones into the national airspace while reducing risks to public safety and security,” the department said.

Under the program, drones will be test flown at night, fly over people for safety tests, fly out of sight of the operators and deliver packages. It would also test technologies to prevent collisions with other aircraft. 

“Drones are proving to be especially valuable in emergency situations, including assessing damage from natural disasters such as the recent hurricanes and the wildfires in California,” Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said.

A novelty for now

Right now, drones in the United States are largely a novelty. Federal aviation officials say there are about 1 million registered drones in the country. Most of them belong to people who fly them as a hobby.

They are small and relatively inexpensive and can be modified to deliver small packages and even pizzas.

But the lack of federal and local rules and safety regulations have restricted more widespread commercial use.

There is also the inevitable concern that drones could become a tool for terrorists.

Terrorist tool?

FBI Director Christopher Wray recently told a U.S. Senate panel, “The expectation is it’s coming here imminently.” He called drones “relatively easy to acquire, relatively easy to operate, and quite difficult to disrupt and monitor.”

A drone flown by a hobbyist unintentionally crash landed on the White House lawn in 2015.

Along with Wednesday’s announced test program, the Trump administration wants to enhance the powers of police to track drones and shoot down any that appear to be a threat.
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Facebook is partnering with a developer to build a wind power farm in northeast Nebraska that will supply energy for the company’s planned data center.

The social media giant announced last week that it has partnered with Trade Winds Energy to build the Rattlesnake Creek Wind Project in rural Dixon County.

Facebook plans to use energy from the wind farm to power its upcoming data center in Papillion, a suburb of Omaha. Of the 320 megawatts of power the wind farm will create, 200 of them will be allocated to the data center while the remaining will be available for other buyers.

Officials said the project will produce the second-largest wind farm in Nebraska, behind the 400-megawatt Grande Prairie project in Holt County. Officials also said the new wind farm will generate enough energy to power 90,000 homes.

Both projects are examples of the state’s rich wind resource being acknowledged, said David Bracht, director of the Nebraska Energy Office.

“The wind projects that have been installed [in Nebraska] have shown themselves to be very, very productive,” Bracht said.

A new electric rate structure rolled out in January by the Omaha Public Power District means Facebook can power its data center with 100 percent clean energy. The company also aims to get at least 50 percent of its total electricity consumption from clean and renewable energy sources in 2018.

Neither Facebook nor Trade Winds provided a timeline or cost for the wind farm.

 
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A university engineering department has developed what amounts to a Tinder app for criminals — a computer program that matches inmates with suitable prisons.

The software, unique in the corrections field, has saved the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections about $3 million in its first year. It’s resulted in fewer prison assaults, shortened wait times for treatment programs by nearly two months, reduced the number of prison transfers and lightened the workload of corrections staff.

Corrections officials marvel that nobody thought of it sooner.

“It’s pretty amazing, and what we’ve seen so far is the outcomes are a lot better,” said Major William Nicklow of the state prison in Camp Hill, who oversaw the project as the prison system’s director of population management.

On Tuesday, the Lehigh University team that developed the software accepted the Wagner Prize, the top international prize in the field of operations research practice.

Their work has dramatically simplified the job of assigning inmates to prisons.

Previously, corrections staff handled prisoner assignments one at a time, a laborious and inefficient process that meant inmates farther down the list were at a disadvantage when it came to placement in high-demand treatment programs.

The software, in contrast, can assign hundreds of inmates simultaneously, taking into account dozens of factors including age and other inmate demographics, criminal history, mental illness, and educational and vocational interests to come up with the most appropriate placement for each inmate. It also identifies gang members as well as inmates most likely to be violent and separates them, reducing the threat at individual prisons.

The software can finish in minutes what it took a staff of seven an entire week to do.

“This very complex problem is mathematically modeled, put in the system and the system is advising where the inmate has to be assigned,” said Tamas Terlaky, one of the program’s developers and a professor in Lehigh’s industrial and systems engineering department. “The benefits are quite obvious.”

Other corrections departments have taken note. At least three other states as well as the federal prison system have made inquiries about the software, Terlaky said.
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Americans could see a lot more drones flying around their communities as the result of a Trump administration test program to increase government and commercial use of the unmanned aircraft.

President Donald Trump gave the go-ahead Wednesday, signing a directive intended to increase the number and complexity of drone flights.

The presidential memo would allow exemptions from current safety rules so communities could move ahead with testing of drone operations.

States, communities and tribes selected to participate would devise their own trial programs in partnership with government and industry drone users. The administration anticipates approving at least five applications, but there is no limit on the number of communities that can join.

The Federal Aviation Administration would review each program. The agency would grant waivers, if necessary, to rules that now restrict drone operations. Examples include prohibitions on flights over people, nighttime flights and flights beyond the line of sight of the drone operator.

Among the things that could be tested are package deliveries; the reliability and security of data links between pilot and aircraft; and technology to prevent collisions between drones and other aircraft and to detect and counter drones flying in restricted areas.

Drone-makers and businesses that want to fly drones have pushed for looser restrictions. Trump discussed the issue with industry leaders at a White House meeting in June.

In the past two years, the FAA has registered over 1 million drones. The majority of them belong to hobbyists. There are now more registered drones than registered manned aircraft in the U.S.

Safety restrictions on drone flights have limited drone use, and U.S. technology companies seeking to test and deploy commercial drones have often done so overseas. For example, Google’s Project Wing is testing drones in Australia, and Amazon is testing drone deliveries in the United Kingdom.

“In order to maintain American leadership in this emerging industry here at home, our country needs a regulatory framework that encourages innovation while ensuring airspace safety,” Michael Kratsios of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told reporters in a conference call.

The trial program will collect data on drone operations that will aid the government’s effort to develop a separate air traffic control system for low-flying unmanned aircraft, he said.

The test zones are expected to start going into place in about a year. The program would continue for three years after that.

Safety concerns over drones have risen recently after the collision of a civilian drone and an Army helicopter over Staten Island, New York, and the first verified collision in North America between a drone and a commercial aircraft, in Quebec City, Canada.

The test program doesn’t address complaints by local governments that low-flying drones present safety, privacy and nuisance risks. The FAA says it has the sole authority to regulate the national airspace, but some communities have passed their own restrictions.

Doug Johnson, vice president of technology policy at the Consumer Technology Association, said the test program recognizes that “the federal government cannot manage policymaking and enforcement by itself” and must work with local governments.

“Public-private partnerships like those that would be created by the program are critical to realizing the economic benefits of drones,” he said.

The association, whose members include drone-makers, has estimated 3.4 million drones valued will be sold in the U.S. this year, 40 percent more than last year. Revenue from those sales is estimated at about $1.1 billion.

 
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A new strain of malicious software has paralyzed computers at a Ukrainian airport, the Ukrainian capital’s subway and at some independent Russian media.

The Odessa international airport in Ukraine’s south, the Kyiv subway and prominent Russian media outlets such as Interfax and Fontanka on Tuesday reported being targeted.

The cyberattack appears to be similar to a major attack in June that locked the computers of hospitals, government offices and major multinationals with encryption that demanded a ransom for their release. The software appeared to have originated in Ukraine.

Moscow-based cyber security firm Group-IP said in a statement Wednesday the ransomware called BadRabbit also tried to penetrate the computers of major Russian banks but failed. None of the banks has reported any attacks.

Moscow-based cyber security company Kaspersky Lab said it was aware of more than 200 companies in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and Germany targeted by the ransomware.

The Odessa airport said in a statement its information systems have been affected, although it continues to service flights. The subway in the capital, Kyiv, said it cannot process online payments and bank card payments.

The operations of Russia’s only privately owned news agency, Interfax, have been paralyzed since Tuesday.

 
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