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

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

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

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

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

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

Being ‘more present’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smith said the success of the program would be measured first by how it provided digital skills to students and then by the job creation, economic growth and “making a difference in the lives of real people.”
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Microsoft said Thursday that it would team up with communities in six U.S. states to invest in technology and related jobs in rural and smaller metropolitan areas.

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

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

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

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

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

Being ‘more present’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skills will need to be updated

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

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

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

Few have lost jobs to automation

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

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

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

Self-driving cars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual bomb disposal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shifting scenarios

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

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

Faigmane, Chief Technical Advisor to the United Nations demining project in Cambodia, says the software would be particularly useful in training explosive ordinance disposal techs working as peacekeepers outside of their country, such as Cambodians who are being deployed in South Sudan.

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

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

Using a smartphone held in a roughly $10 bifocal headset strapped to the head, a user’s vision is replaced by a live point-of-view feed captured from the phone’s camera.

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

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

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

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

“That is really good because that gets the knowledge into more hands at the level that are actually encountering the UXO all over the world,” he said.
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The mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which at least 59 people were killed and more than 500 injured, was the saddest day ever recorded on Twitter, according to Hedonometer, a tool that measures sentiment on social media platforms.

The barometer, which measures the happiness of millions of Twitter users based on their posts, showed an average happiness level of 5.77 on Monday when the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history occurred at a country music festival in Las Vegas.

The previous record low was 5.84 on the day of another mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, that killed at least 49 people and injured more than 50 last year.

The third-saddest recorded day on Twitter was Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, according to Hedonometer. The barometer on that day was 5.87.

The happiest recorded day on Twitter was on Christmas day of 2008, when the day’s score was 6.36. The tool has been tracking Twitter sentiment since 2008.

Hedonometer was invented by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Vermont’s Advanced Computing Center. It gathers sentences that start with “I feel” or “I am feeling” and generates a happiness score for the text. Each sentence is then given a happiness score from 1 to 9.
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The European Court of Justice has been asked to consider whether Facebook’s Dublin-based subsidiary can legally transfer users’ personal data to its U.S. parent, after Ireland’s top court said Tuesday that there are “well-founded concerns” the practice violates European law.

In a case brought after former U.S. defense contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of electronic surveillance by American security agencies, the Irish court found that Facebook’s transfers may compromise the data of European citizens.

The case has far-reaching implications for social media companies and others who move large amounts of data via the internet. Facebook’s European subsidiary regularly does so.

Ireland’s data commissioner had already issued a preliminary decision that such transfers may be illegal because agreements between Facebook and its Irish subsidiary don’t adequately protect the privacy of European citizens. The Irish High Court is referring the case to the European Court of Justice because the data sharing agreements had been approved by the European Union’s executive Commission.

Ireland’s data commissioner “has raised well-founded concerns that there is an absence of an effective remedy in U.S. law . for an EU citizen whose data are transferred to the U.S. where they may be at risk of being accessed and processed by U.S. state agencies for national security purposes in a manner incompatible” with the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Irish High Court said Tuesday.

Austrian privacy campaigner Maximillian Schrems, who has a Facebook account, had challenged this practice through the Irish courts because of concerns that his data was being illegally accessed by U.S security agencies.

“U.S. citizens would not be allowed to have such mass surveillance as for European citizens and we have to protect our citizens,” Schrems said. “And actually, Europe protects anybody because we see it as a human right, not as a citizens’ right.”

Facebook said standard contract clauses provided critical safeguards and that such safeguards are used by thousands of companies to do business.

“They are essential to companies of all sizes, and upholding them is critical to ensuring the economy can continue to grow without disruption,” the company said in statement.

It added that it was important that the European court “now considers the extensive evidence demonstrating the robust protections in place under standard contractual clauses and U.S. law before it makes any decision that may endanger the transfer of data across the Atlantic and around the globe.”

In an earlier ruling in the case, the European Court of Justice found that the so-called Safe Harbor regime, which Facebook previously relied on when transferring data to the U.S., violated EU law because it didn’t provide effective legal remedies. The Safe Harbor regime had been established in 2000 by the EU executive Commission, which found that U.S. data protection laws were adequate to protect the rights of EU citizens.

The Irish Data Commissioner decided to seek judicial review of standard contractual clauses in part because of “the very significant commercial implications arising from the value of data exchanges to EU-U.S. trading relationships.”

The U.S. government and three other parties were allowed to file friend of the court briefs in the case. The others are the BSA Business Software Alliance, a trade association whose members include Apple, Microsoft and Intel; Digital Europe, which represents the region’s digital technology industry; and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a U.S. civil liberties group.
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Google is ending a decade-old policy that required publishers to provide some free stories to Google users — though it’s not clear how many readers will even notice, at least for the moment.

Publishers had been required to provide at least three free stories a day under the search engine’s previous policy, called “first click free.” Now they have the power to choose how many free articles they want to offer readers via Google before charging a fee, Richard Gingras, vice president of news at Google Inc., wrote Monday in a company blog post.

The goal is to help publishers build up digital subscriptions, an imperative for many media outlets that pay large sums for news production but are starved for advertising revenue.

Google’s previous approach had let readers skirt paywall policies by typing a headline into Google and getting access to a story without having it count against a monthly free article limit, said Kinsey Wilson, an adviser to New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson.

Impact on readers

Many online readers may not notice a change overnight unless they visit a particular site several times a month without subscribing. And not every publication blocks users from reading stories with a paywall. Newer digital-only outfits tend not to.

Newspaper companies that do cut off readers tend to do so after a certain monthly allotment of free stories. The Times offers 10 free articles, for example; the Boston Globe, two.

Newspaper companies are trying to cope with steep declines in print-ad revenues as advertising has moved online. Google and social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are powerful drivers of traffic for publishers. But mandated freebie articles can complicate publishers’ attempts to bolster their paid-subscriber base.

News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal had turned off “first click free” for its four main sections in January. It then lost half its Google traffic to articles, said spokesman Steve Severinghaus. Google would demote a publisher’s content if they didn’t use first click free, but now says that won’t happen anymore.

Jason Kint, the head of the Digital Content Next media trade group, said he expects Google’s change will lead to news sites enabling more subscription models, making it harder down the road for web users to gorge themselves on stories from a particular outlet without paying for it.

Turning to subscriptions

Subscription revenue is increasingly important for newspaper publishers. Print-ad revenue continues to shrink, and Facebook and Google are gobbling up most digital ad revenue. Research firm eMarketer says the two companies will take in 63 percent of U.S. digital ad dollars this year.

Facebook, too, is working on a way for news articles to charge readers for articles they share and read on the social network.

News outlets have become more aggressive at challenging the Silicon Valley giants. In July, news outlets sought permission from Congress for the right to negotiate jointly with Google and Facebook, given the duo’s dominance in online advertising and online news traffic.

In a statement Monday, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said Google’s change would be good for journalism if “properly introduced.”

In months of testing with Google, reducing those free clicks from three to zero “generally improved” subscription rates, the New York Times’ Wilson said. But he added the Times continues to assess whether to actually reduce the number of free clicks now that it can. He said it was “not simply a mechanical decision” because the Times’ mission was in part to make sure its news was available to a wide audience and to set the news agenda.

Google says it made the changes after feedback from and experiments with publishers. The company also says it wants to make subscribing to publications a more streamlined process and says it is working on ways to use its artificial intelligence capabilities to help publishers find new subscribers.
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In most of the world, more men are connected to the internet than women. But in Africa, this gender gap has been widening, according to ITU, the U.N. agency tracking the ICT sector. Nanjira Sambuli, who works with the World Wide Web Foundation in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, sat down with VOA’s Jill Craig in Nairobi to explain how offline inequalities are being replicated online.
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