The Iranian military has banned the unauthorized use of drones in the capital Tehran, after several security scares caused by unpiloted aircraft that are increasingly popular with hobbyists and filmmakers.

The general staff of the armed forces has issued an edict which means drones may only be used if they have been given permits from one of two government ministries or the state broadcaster, a senior Revolutionary Guard commander said on Monday.

“Flying private and personal quadcopters … is forbidden in Tehran,” Seyed Ali Reza Rabiei, operations commander at the Tharallah military base in Tehran, was quoted as saying by the Tasnim news site.

In December, Iranian security forces shot down a drone as it approached the Tehran offices of the president and the supreme leader. Media later reported the aircraft was being operated by a film crew shooting aerial footage for a documentary.

Last month, security forces shot at a quadcopter that entered a restricted zone in central Tehran which then flew off.
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Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has formed a strategic partnership with retail conglomerate Bailian Group, extending a push into bricks-and-mortar retail as online growth slows.

The move comes on the heels of a recent purchase of a stake in retailer Suning Commerce Group Co Ltd as well as plans to take a controlling stake in Intime Retail Group Co Ltd and privatize it.

There are currently no plans for financial investment, an Alibaba spokesman said.

Shanghai-based Bailian Group is one of China’s largest retailers by sales, operating 4,700 outlets in 200 cities including supermarkets, convenience stores and pharmacies. Alibaba has an active user base of around 500 million.

Shares in Bailian Group’s subsidiaries surged on Monday, with Shanghai Bailian Group Co Ltd climbing by the 10 percent daily limit, Lianhua Supermarket Holdings Co Ltd jumping close to 10 percent and Shanghai Material Trading Co Ltd up 5 percent.

Bailian and Alibaba will initially cooperate on supply chain technology using Alibaba’s big data capabilities as well as integrating Alipay payments with Bailian Group’s existing membership program.
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Twenty years ago Japanese carmaker Toyota unveiled the first version of its hybrid gas-electric car called Prius. By the beginning of 2017, counting all subsequent models, Prius became the best-selling hybrid car in the world with close to 4 million sold. Its latest model, with a battery-charging solar roof, was just unveiled in Japan. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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On her website, former acrobat Silke Pan has a quote that says: “You are stronger than you ever expected!” She’s had to be. After working as a professional acrobat for years, she was sidelined in 2007 when a fall left her unable to use her legs. Now she is walking again, thanks to a new modular lightweight exoskeleton. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Most experts agree that we are past the dawn of robotic age, and one of the countries strongly pushing to the forefront is China. As the cost of human labor in China is rising, factories are increasingly replacing production line workers with robots. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Google’s parent company, Alphabet, says the company has made a “breakthrough” on its plans to offer Internet access to rural areas via connected balloons through an endeavor called Project Loon.

Initially, the idea was to have a steady stream of balloons circling the globe. When one went out of range in a certain area, another would arrive to maintain connectivity to those using the access provided by the balloons.

But now, the company says that through its “smart software,” it has now figured out a way to make the balloons loiter in one place over an extended period of time.

“Project Loon’s algorithms can now send small teams of balloons to form a cluster over a specific region where people need internet access,” the company wrote in an online post. “This is a shift from our original model for Loon in which we planned to create rings of balloons sailing around the globe, and balloons would take turns moving through a region to provide service.”

The company says the discovery was made during testing of balloons launched from Puerto Rico to “hang out” in Peruvian airspace. Some of the balloons lingered there for as long as three months, the company said.

The discovery should speed up the project and reduce costs.

“We’ll reduce the number of balloons we need and get greater value out of each one,” the company said in the post. “All of this helps reduce the costs of operating a Loon-powered network, which is good news for the telco partners we’ll work with around the world to make Loon a reality, and critical given that cost has been one key factor keeping reliable internet from people living in rural and remote regions.”

The Project Loon idea was sparked as a way to bring internet connectivity to the billions around the world who do not have access.

Rather than install traditional and expensive terrestrial wiring, the idea was to float huge, Internet-beaming balloons some 20 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. The balloons would then ride air currents to either remain in place or move to a new location.

Despite the breakthrough, Project Loon still must figure out how to increase the longevity of the balloons, which has maxed out at 190 days, according to the BBC.

Google has also explored the idea of providing internet to rural areas using solar-powered drones, but cancelled the notion due to technological hurdles and costs. Facebook is also looking to do something similar, but one of its drones crashed last summer.
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Mark Zuckerberg helped create the modern world by connecting nearly a quarter of its citizens to Facebook and giving them a platform to share, well, everything – baby pictures and Pepe memes, social updates and abusive bullying, helpful how-to videos and live-streamed violence.

Now he wants to remake it, too, in a way that counters isolationism, promotes global connections and addresses social ills – while also cementing Facebook’s central role as a builder of online “community” for its nearly 2 billion users.

The Facebook founder laid out his thoughts on Thursday in a sweeping 5,800-word manifesto that hews closer to utopian social guide than business plan. Are we, he asked in the document, “building the world we all want?”

In a phone interview with The Associated Press, Zuckerberg stressed that he wasn’t motivated by the recent U.S. election or any other particular event. Rather, he said, it’s the growing sentiment in many parts of the world that “connecting the world” – the founding idea behind Facebook – is no longer a good thing.

“Across the world there are people left behind by globalization, and movements for withdrawing from global connection,” Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, wrote on Thursday. So it falls to his company to “develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.”

Connecting in Facebook’s interest

Zuckerberg, 32, told the AP that he still strongly believes that more connectedness is the right direction for the world. But, he added, it’s “not enough if it’s good for some people but it’s doesn’t work for other people. We really have to bring everyone along.”

It’s hardly a surprise that Zuckerberg wants to find ways to bring more people together, especially on Facebook. After all, getting more people to come together on the social network more frequently would give Facebook more opportunities to sell the ads that generate most of its revenue, which totaled $27 billion last year. And bringing in more money probably would boost Facebook’s stock price to make Zuckerberg – already worth an estimated $56 billion – even richer.

And while the idea of unifying the world is laudable, some critics – backed by various studies – contend that Facebook makes some people feel lonelier and more isolated as they scroll through the mostly ebullient posts and photos shared on the social network. Facebook’s famous “like” button also makes it easy to engage in a form of “one-click” communication that can displace meaningful dialogue.

Facebook also has been lambasted as a polarizing force by circulating posts espousing similar viewpoints and interests among like-minded people, creating an “echo chamber” that can harden opinions and widen political and cultural chasms.

Community support

Today, most of Facebook’s 1.86 billion members – about 85 percent – live outside of the U.S. and Canada. The Menlo Park, California-based company has offices everywhere from Amsterdam to Jakarta, Indonesia, to Tel Aviv, Israel. (It is banned in China, the world’s most populous country, though some people get around the ban.) Naturally, Zuckerberg takes a global view of Facebook and sees potential that goes beyond borders, cities and nations.

Equally naturally, he sees the social network stepping up as more traditional cultural ties fray. People already use Facebook to connect with strangers who have the same rare disease, to post political diatribes, to share news links (and sometimes fake news links). Facebook has also pushed its users to register to vote, to donate to causes, to mark themselves safe after natural disasters, and to “go live.”  For many, it’s become a utility. Some 1.23 billion people use it daily.

“Our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community – for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all,” he wrote.

Long view

Zuckerberg has gotten Facebook to this position of global dominance – one that Myspace and Twitter, for instance, never even approached – partly thanks to his audacious, long-term view of the company and its place in the world.

Last fall, Zuckerberg and his wife, the doctor Priscilla Chan, unveiled the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a long-term effort aimed at eradicating all disease by the end of this century. Then, as now, Zuckerberg preferred to look far down the road to the potential of scientific and technological innovations that have not been perfected, or even invented yet.

That includes artificial intelligence, which in this case means software that’s capable of “thinking” enough like humans to start making the sorts of judgments that Facebook sometimes bobbles. Last September, for instance, the service briefly barred the famous Vietnam War-era photograph dubbed “Napalm Girl” because it featured a nude child, and only reversed its decision after users – including the prime minister of Norway – protested.

AI systems could also comb through the vast amount of material users post on Facebook to detect everything from bullying to the early signs of suicidal thinking to extremist recruiting. AI, Zuckerberg wrote, could “understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community.”

Speaking to the AP, Zuckerberg said he understands that we might not “solve all the issues that we want” in the short term.

“One of my favorite quotes is this Bill Gates quote, that `people overestimate what they can get done in two years and underestimate what they can get done in 10 years.’ And that’s an important mindset that I hope more people take today,” he said.
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A smart trap for mosquitoes? A new high-tech version is promising to catch the bloodsuckers while letting friendlier insects escape — and even record the exact weather conditions when different species emerge to bite.

Whether it really could improve public health is still to be determined. But when the robotic traps were pilot-tested around Houston last summer, they accurately captured particular mosquito species — those capable of spreading the Zika virus and certain other diseases — that health officials wanted to track, researchers reported Thursday.

The traps act like “a field biologist in real time that’s making choices about the insects it wants to capture,” said Microsoft lead researcher Ethan Jackson, who displayed a prototype trap at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

The traps are part of Microsoft’s broader Project Premonition, aimed at learning how to spot early signs of outbreaks.

“It catches people’s imagination,” said University of Florida medical entomology professor Jonathan Day, who isn’t involved with the project. “But whether it is actually a trap that will functionally improve surveillance, I think that remains to be seen.”

Trapping is a key part of mosquito surveillance and control, important so health officials know where to spray or take other measures to fight mosquito-borne diseases. Trapping hasn’t changed much in decades: Typically net traps are outfitted with mosquito-attracting bait and a fan, and suck in whatever insect gets close enough. Entomologists later sort the bugs for the ones they want.

Jackson’s trap consists of 64 “smart cells,” compartments outfitted with an infrared light beam. When an insect crosses the beam, its shadow changes the light intensity in a way that forms almost a fingerprint for that species, Jackson said.

Program the trap for the desired species — such as the Aedes aegypti mosquito that is the main Zika threat — and when one flies into a cell, its door snaps closed. In pilot testing in Harris County, Texas, last July and August, the trap was more than 90 percent accurate in identifying the insect buzzing through the door, Jackson said.

Harris County already is well known in public health for strong mosquito surveillance, and had been keeping a sharp eye out for Zika — fortunately finding none. But mosquito control director Mustapha Debboun called the high-tech trap promising, and is looking forward to larger scale testing this summer.

“If we are trying to collect the Zika virus mosquito, you can teach this trap to collect just that mosquito,” he said.

When each mosquito is captured, sensors record the time, temperature, humidity and other factors, to show what environmental conditions have different species buzzing. That’s information officials might use to schedule pesticide spraying.

The next step: Rapid genetic scans of the mosquitoes’ blood check for harmful pathogens — and can tell what animal the mosquito had been biting, Jackson said. If that work pans out, he said the data may help predict emerging diseases.

But bringing Microsoft’s tech know-how to mosquito control ultimately will depend on cost, cautioned Debboun, who spends about $350 for one of today’s traps and says the new high-tech ones can’t cost more.

While Jackson doesn’t know a final price, he said he used low-cost microprocessors and other equipment to design the traps and plans to test if drones can place them in remote areas.

Today’s traps already provide lots of useful information, Florida’s Day noted. Some mosquito species are so plentiful that he can catch thousands in a single trap. Others, like Aedes aegypti, are much harder to find, and information about when it flies might be useful, he said.
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Big data is playing an increasing role in people’s lives.

Loosely defined as data that is too massive to be contained or processed by any one machine or person, it includes information on individuals’ Facebook likes, supermarket loyalty cards, and other seemingly innocuous personal information that was used by both the Trump and Brexit campaigns to reach voters who wouldn’t normally disclose their political opinions.

Finding out more about people

Apps created by researchers in Britain and the United States can guess how old a person is, their IQ, and to whom they are sexually attracted.

“There’s lots of different sources for sentiment data,” said John Kreisa, a London-based executive at Hortonworks, a California software company. “One probably very obvious one is things like Twitter. Social media in general is a way that people express themselves and express a like or dislike, sentiments obviously positive or negative,” Kreisa said.

By themselves, the trillions of bits of information would amount to a pile of worthless junk. Add the power of the human mind, and it is a different story.

When Julian Dailly graduated from the University of Sussex with a degree in English and philosophy and faced a world dominated by machines and technology, he wondered how he was going to make a living. Now, he is part of a mega industry that, considering it includes Google and Facebook, is so large no one seems able to estimate its worth.

Predicting what people will do

Dailly’s research company, Morar Consulting, started three years ago with five employees. With annual revenues up by 25 percent each year, Dailly’s firm now has a staff of 90.

“What we ultimately do here is we try to discover what’s meaningful for people, and we correlate that to their economic behavior.” Dailly said.

Diversity, he adds, is important.

“There’s always the risk I think if you have people from too similar backgrounds that you end up with a bit of group think. You don’t consider all the alternatives, and you maybe take too many bets on the same thing,” Dailly said. “We have people from traditional research backgrounds, in addition to some in social sciences, economics, people from tech backgrounds, and sales people.”

Companies like Dailly’s also draw recent college graduates who bring perspectives of youth to the industry.

New forms of data also make it possible for analysts to predict the future. They are thus more valuable to companies and campaigns than the traditional forms of recordkeeping, recording or reporting data.

“We have access to the core information inside people’s heads,” Dailly said. “They tell you what people are going to do as opposed to what they’ve done. That helps people take preemptive action. This makes it much more useful for strategy.”

Brexit, Trump and Clinton used this new data

Both the Clinton and Trump campaigns used big data, with Trump hiring the London-based Cambridge Analytica. The company employs a trademark method known as “psychographs” that uses psychological profiling to influence consumers. The company also provided its services to the Brexit campaign.

Both the Trump and the Brexit campaigns faced charges of xenophobia, a topic many people preferred not to discuss.

For both Trump and Brexit, polls had predicted Election Day losses. But their victories hinged on voters who had remained quiet during the campaign, often declining to publicly state their opinions out of concern of being labeled as racist.

Big Data beat the polls

Polls did not tell the truth, but big data did.

“You just rely on data that you collect at the polls, you’re not going to be able to gather the same amount of data, but also people might lie or might not reveal whom they will vote for or what way they are going to vote,” said Tamara Chehayeb Makarem, a user experience designer at Scott Logic, a British software development consultancy.

“Using big data, you would be able to generate certain patterns, and what people like,” she said. “Let’s say what you like something on Facebook, if you publish certain articles, follow certain people. That could give them (campaign strategists) an indicator about your views, and based on that they could get a better indication about how likely you are to vote for someone or something.” 

The prospect of having companies read minds is spooky, and there has been pushback. Facebook has blocked the use of much of its content and the European Union has enacted some of the world’s toughest privacy protections.

Many uses for Big Data

Proponents of the industry are eager to show that big data is a force for good.

Laurie Miles, director of analytics at SAS UK, an analytics company whose clients include HSBC. He says the ability to capture and process data in real time is crucial for protecting credit card users. 

“You go into a shop, you swipe your card,” she said. “In real time, it’s determined whether that transaction is likely to be fraudulent or not.”

Dailly, of Morar Consulting, discounts concerns that computers have finally taken over.

“There is a moment of suspension of disbelief when we allow ourselves to believe that humans will be allowed to be replaced by machines. I think it’s a fantasy,” he said.

Artificial intelligence will evolve and so will their autonomy to make decisions, he said.

“But fundamentally, they will always be plugged into the wall. They can be turned off. With that in mind, humans will still remain in control.”
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A rising tide of automation, trade problems and lagging growth in productivity have slashed millions of jobs from the U.S. manufacturing sector. At the same time, a small factory in Massachusetts has been hiring, expanding and exporting. Riverdale Mills hopes to grow further by making unusual products and building a strong workforce. VOA’s Jim Randle reports.
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Many dogs and cats have it, and now a small company in Belgium says if people carried a personal identifying chip under their skin, modern life could become a lot easier. Others agree, but what if the technology changes? VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A teenager in northwestern Cameroon has become the first African to win Google’s global youth coding challenge, despite an ongoing internet blackout in his hometown.

Nji Patrick Gbah’s tailor shop in Bamenda is buzzing with business and pride. His son, Collins, was recently named one of 34 grand-prize winners in this year’s Google Code-In, a global challenge for young programmers.

He used to punish his son for “joking” with the computer.

“I was feeling that he is just spending his time without doing house chores. At times I used to seize my computer and lock it in the house and I tell him not to use it anymore because I was believing that he is just spending time on that computer for nothing,” said the teen’s father.

Nji Collins Gbah has won a trip to Google headquarters in California this June with the other top finishers. 

The competition was open to students between the ages of 13 and 17. More than 1,300 young people from 62 countries participated this year.

“The only thing I want to say is focus on studies,” Collins said. “Get to know more about the opportunities that are around you and go to sites which have real information about opportunities like this.” 

But that may be hard at the moment for his fellow students in Bamenda. In mid-January, the internet was cut to English-speaking parts of Cameroon, amid ongoing unrest.

Collins had to plead with his uncle for travel money so he could go to to Mbouda, a French-speaking town 30 kilometers away, to get online and compete. He had just a few days to complete 842 programming tasks.

Many believe the government ordered the internet blackout, though there has been no official confirmation.

Teachers and lawyers have been on strike in the English-speaking regions since November. They have been joined by activists calling for secession. Some demonstrations have turned violent and dozens of people have been arrested.

Officials say activists have been using social media to spread anti-government messages.

Cameroon’s minister of post and telecommunication, Libom Li Likeng, told VOA there has to be a responsible use of technology. She says although social networks provide lots of opportunities, they have noticed that many people use them for unhealthy purposes.

African countries have been increasingly responding to unrest by cutting internet access. Uganda, Congo and Mali are just a few other examples.

Last week, a U.N. rights expert called the internet blackout in parts of Cameroon “an appalling violation” of freedom of expression.

Residents in affected areas say it is impacting the economy as money transfer services and ATM’s are not working.
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