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Time for a Pause

You could easily write a book, or, better yet, make a movie about the drama that engulfed Sony Pictures and “The Interview,” Sony’s own movie about the fictionalized assassination of North Korea’s real-life dictator. The whole saga reflects so many of the changes that are roiling and reshaping today’s world before we’ve learned to adjust to them.

Think about this: In November 2013, hackers stole 40 million credit and debit card numbers from Target’s point-of-sale systems. Beginning in late August 2014, nude photos believed to have been stored by celebrities on Apple’s iCloud were spilled onto the sidewalk. Thanksgiving brought us the Sony hack, when, as The Times reported: “Everything and anything had been taken. Contracts. Salary lists. Film budgets. Medical records. Social Security numbers. Personal emails. Five entire movies.” And, on Christmas, gaming networks for both the Sony PlayStation and the Microsoft Xbox were shut down by hackers. But rising cybercrime is only part of the story. Every day a public figure is apologizing for something crazy or foul that he or she muttered, uttered, tweeted or shouted that went viral — including the rantings of an N.B.A. owner in his girlfriend’s living room.

What’s going on? We’re in the midst of a Gutenberg-scale change in how information is generated, stored, shared, protected and turned into products and services. We are seeing individuals become superempowered to challenge governments and corporations. And we are seeing the rise of apps that are putting strangers into intimate proximity in each other’s homes (think Airbnb) and into each other’s cars (think Uber) and into each other’s heads (think Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). Thanks to the integration of networks, smartphones, banks and markets, the world has never been more tightly wired. As they say: “Lost there, felt here.” Whispered there, heard here. And it’s now hit a tipping point.

“The world is not just rapidly changing; it is being dramatically reshaped,” Dov Seidman, author of the book “How” and C.E.O. of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership, argued to me in a recent conversation. “It operates differently. It’s not just interconnected; it’s interdependent. More than ever before, we rise and fall together. So few can now so easily and so profoundly affect so many so far away.”

But, he added, “it’s all happened faster than we’ve reshaped ourselves and developed the necessary norms, behaviors, laws and institutions to adapt.”

The implications for leading and operating are enormous. For starters, our privacy walls are proving no match for the new technologies. “Now, we’re not only getting X-ray vision into the behavior of others,” said Seidman. “We’re getting fine-grained M.R.I.’s into the inner workings of palaces, boardrooms and organizations and into the mind-sets of those who lead them.”

So how does anyone adapt? Just disconnect? “Trying to disconnect to avoid exposure in a connected world is a misguided strategy,” argued Seidman. “If you do that, how will you create value and get anything done?” The right strategy is “to deepen and strengthen all these connections.”

But how? “If we’re in an interdependent world, then the only strategy for countries, companies and individuals is to build healthy interdependencies so we rise, and not fall, together,” Seidman added. “This comes down to behavior. It means being guided by sustainable values like humility, integrity and respect in how we work with others: values that build healthy interdependencies.” It means shunning “situational ‘values,’ just doing whatever the situation allows.”

The American-Canadian relationship is a healthy interdependency. The relationship between police forces and black youths today is an unhealthy interdependency. The relationship between Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and his police force is an unhealthy interdependency.

But there is another critical part. It’s how we learn to respond to all the secrets being revealed: the C.E.O.’s email that makes him or her look foolish, but also reveals that women are being paid less than men in the same jobs; the video of a suspect being killed by police; the elevator footage of a football player knocking out his fiancée; and private photos of movie stars. They all have different moral and societal significance. We need to deal with them differently.

“We need to pause more to make sense of all the M.R.I.’s we’re being exposed to,” argued Seidman. In the pause, “we reflect and imagine a better way.” In some cases, that could mean showing empathy for the fact that humans are imperfect. In others, it could mean “taking principled stands” toward those whose behaviors “make this interdependent world unsafe, unstable or unfree.”

In short, there’s never been a time when we need more people living by the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Because, in today’s world, more people can see into you and do unto you than ever before. Otherwise, we’re going to end up with a “gotcha” society, lurching from outrage to outrage, where in order to survive you’ll either have to disconnect or constantly censor yourself because every careless act or utterance could ruin your life. Who wants to live that way?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/opini ... d=45305309

Can Students Have Too Much Tech?

PRESIDENT OBAMA’s domestic agenda, which he announced in his State of the Union address this month, has a lot to like: health care, maternity leave, affordable college. But there was one thing he got wrong. As part of his promise to educate American children for an increasingly competitive world, he vowed to “protect a free and open Internet” and “extend its reach to every classroom and every community.”

More technology in the classroom has long been a policy-making panacea. But mounting evidence shows that showering students, especially those from struggling families, with networked devices will not shrink the class divide in education. If anything, it will widen it.

In the early 2000s, the Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd tracked the academic progress of nearly one million disadvantaged middle-school students against the dates they were given networked computers. The researchers assessed the students’ math and reading skills annually for five years, and recorded how they spent their time. The news was not good.

“Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” the economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.

In fact, the students’ academic scores dropped and remained depressed for as long as the researchers kept tabs on them. What’s worse, the weaker students (boys, African-Americans) were more adversely affected than the rest. When their computers arrived, their reading scores fell off a cliff.

We don’t know why this is, but we can speculate. With no adults to supervise them, many kids used their networked devices not for schoolwork, but to play games, troll social media and download entertainment. (And why not? Given their druthers, most adults would do the same.)

The problem is the differential impact on children from poor families. Babies born to low-income parents spend at least 40 percent of their waking hours in front of a screen — more than twice the time spent by middle-class babies. They also get far less cuddling and bantering over family meals than do more privileged children. The give-and-take of these interactions is what predicts robust vocabularies and school success. Apps and videos don’t.

If children who spend more time with electronic devices are also more likely to be out of sync with their peers’ behavior and learning by the fourth grade, why would adding more viewing and clicking to their school days be considered a good idea?

An unquestioned belief in the power of gadgetry has already led to educational snafus. Beginning in 2006, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project envisioned a digital utopia in which all students over 6 years old, worldwide, would own their own laptops. Impoverished children would thus have the power to go online and educate themselves — no school or teacher required. With laptops for poor children initially priced at $400, donations poured in.

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But the program didn’t live up to the ballyhoo. For one thing, the machines were buggy and often broke down. And when they did work, the impoverished students who received free laptops spent more time on games and chat rooms and less time on their homework than before, according to the education researchers Mark Warschauer and Morgan Ames. It’s drive-by education — adults distribute the laptops and then walk away.

It’s true that there is often an initial uptick in students’ engagement with their studies — interactive apps can be fun. But the novelty wears off after a few months, said Larry Cuban, an emeritus education professor at Stanford.

Technology does have a role in education. But as Randy Yerrick, a professor of education at the University at Buffalo, told me, it is worth the investment only when it’s perfectly suited to the task, in science simulations, for example, or to teach students with learning disabilities.

And, of course, technology can work only when it is deployed as a tool by a terrific, highly trained teacher. As extensive research shows, just one year with a gifted teacher in middle school makes it far less likely that a student will get pregnant in high school, and much more likely that she will go to college, earn a decent salary, live in a good neighborhood and save for retirement. To the extent that such a teacher can benefit from classroom technology, he or she should get it. But only when such teachers are effectively trained to apply a specific application to teaching a particular topic to a particular set of students — only then does classroom technology really work.

Even then, we still have no proof that the newly acquired, tech-centric skills that students learn in the classroom transfer to novel problems that they need to solve in other areas. While we’re waiting to find out, the public money spent on wiring up classrooms should be matched by training and mentorship programs for teachers, so that a free and open Internet, reached through constantly evolving, beautifully packaged and compelling electronic tools, helps — not hampers — the progress of children who need help the most.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/opini ... 05309&_r=0

Getting the Whole World Online

Years before big technology companies like Google and Facebook began talking about using balloons, drones and cellphones to provide Internet access to billions of people in developing countries, leaders like President Bill Clinton were talking about bridging the “global digital divide.” And while progress has been made in recent years, most of the world’s 7.2 billion people still do not have access to the Internet.

The good news is that most of humanity now lives within reach of wireless networks. About half of the world’s population, or 3.6 billion people, had cellphone service last year, up from 2.3 billion people in 2008. And one-third of all people used mobile networks to connect to the Internet last year. Two main forces have made this possible: rising incomes in developing countries and cheaper wireless devices and service.

The most important thing world leaders can do to make the Internet available to more people is to pursue faster and more equitable economic growth. At the same time, improving access itself can help economies grow by making knowledge more widely available. There are numerous private efforts underway that aim to make Internet access universal.

Google is working on Project Loon, which uses a constellation of giant balloons to beam down wireless signals in the Southern Hemisphere. This will be most useful to people living in remote areas without terrestrial cellular networks. And Facebook has introduced Internet.org, which provides people in some countries, like Kenya, Colombia and India, with access to limited text-based content on their cellphones at no cost; Facebook and searches on Google would be included. The company seems to think that this will encourage some people who are already using cellphones to create a Facebook profile and consider paying for data plans by giving them their first taste of social networking and the Internet.

The big gains will come only when governments do more to increase investments in telecommunications directly or by encouraging private companies to build networks. The most certain way to do that is to foster competition by, for example, selling wireless frequencies to many different companies. This has been happening in places like India.

Other countries, including those in the European Union, have helped to spur Internet adoption by requiring telecom companies to share cables and other equipment with one another. Of course, many dominant state-owned or private phone companies will resist policies intended to encourage competition.

Making the Internet useful will require more than just equipment and networks. Many pages on the web are available only in English or a few other widely spoken languages like French and Mandarin, while billions do not speak those languages. Companies like Google and Facebook have invested in providing their sites in many languages and have offered free translation tools.

The World Wide Web Consortium, which is made up of universities, businesses, government agencies and other groups, is also trying to make the Web usable in more languages by making sure Internet formats and protocols work in different scripts. Governments and businesses should help those efforts by publishing educational, health and other information in more languages.

Bridging the digital divide is not quite as daunting as it once seemed. But neither is progress moving fast enough to allow billions of people to use a communications system that has become indispensable to the modern economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/opini ... 05309&_r=0

Scientists Seek Ban on Method of Editing the Human Genome

A group of leading biologists on Thursday called for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique that would alter human DNA in a way that can be inherited.

The biologists fear that the new technique is so effective and easy to use that some physicians may push ahead before its safety can be assessed. They also want the public to understand the ethical issues surrounding the technique, which could be used to cure genetic diseases, but also to enhance qualities like beauty or intelligence. The latter is a path that many ethicists believe should never be taken.

“You could exert control over human heredity with this technique, and that is why we are raising the issue,” said David Baltimore, a former president of the California Institute of Technology and a member of the group whose paper on the topic was published in the journal Science.

Ethicists, for decades, have been concerned about the dangers of altering the human germline — meaning to make changes to human sperm, eggs or embryos that will last through the life of the individual and be passed on to future generations. Until now, these worries have been theoretical. But a technique invented in 2012 makes it possible to edit the genome precisely and with much greater ease. The technique has already been used to edit the genomes of mice, rats and monkeys, and few doubt that it would work the same way in people.

The technique holds the power to repair or enhance any human gene. “It raises the most fundamental of issues about how we are going to view our humanity in the future and whether we are going to take the dramatic step of modifying our own germline and in a sense take control of our genetic destiny, which raises enormous peril for humanity,” said George Q. Daley, a stem cell expert at Boston Children’s Hospital and a member of the group.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/scien ... d=45305309

Head transplant: Russian man to become first to undergo pioneering and controversial surgery

The first man set to undergo a head transplant has been revealed, saying that he finds the controversial surgery “very scary, but also very interesting”.

Valery Spiridinov is set to be the first person to undergo the operation. It will be carried out by controversial Italian doctor Sergio Canavero, whose optimistic plans have mostly been met with optimism.

But Spiridonov — who has the rare genetic Werdnig-Hoffman disease, which gradually wastes away muscles — says that he is willing to undergo the risky procedure to give himself a chance at living in a healthy body.

“Am I afraid? Yes, of course I am. But it is not just very scary, but also very interesting,” Spiridonov, speaking from his house in the Russian town of Vladimir about 120 miles from Moscow, told MailOnline.

“But you have to understand that I don't really have many choices,” he said. “If I don't try this chance my fate will be very sad. With every year my state is getting worse.”

Spiridinov said that he has spoken with Dr Canavaro over Skype but they are yet to meet. The Russian man was chosen from a number of people that emailed and wrote to Canavaro to ask to undergo the procedure, he said.

Canavaro raised scepticism earlier this year when he said that he would be able to carry out the procedure within two years. Other medical experts called the procedure unlikely, and rare, as well as highlighting the fact that it would never be used for those that simply want to replace an ailing body. Some have even compared Canavaro to Frankenstein.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/hea ... lsignoutmd

Why Pilots Still Matter

Such wishful thinking is perhaps symptomatic of our infatuation with technology and gadgetry, and the belief that we can compute our way out of every problem. The proliferation of drone aircraft also makes it easy to imagine a world of remotely controlled passenger planes. In fact, Boeing has acquired a patent on a sophisticated, remotely operated autopilot system.

But for now these things exist only in the experimental stages. A handful of successful test flights does not prove the viability of a system that would carry up to four million passengers every day around the world. And remember that drones have wholly different missions from those of commercial aircraft, with a lot less at stake if one crashes.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/opini ... d=45305309

The Lost Language of Privacy

David Brooks

Like a lot of people, I’ve come to believe that it would be a good idea to put body-mounted cameras on police officers. I now believe this for several reasons.

First, there have been too many cases in which police officers have abused their authority and then covered it up. Second, it seems probable that cops would be less likely to abuse their authority if they were being tracked. Third, human memory is an unreliable faculty. We might be able to reduce the number of wrongful convictions and acquittals if we have cameras recording more events.

I've come to this conclusion, but I haven’t come to it happily. And, as the debate over cop-cams has unfolded, I’ve been surprised by how many people don’t see the downside to this policy. Most people don’t even seem to recognize the damage these cameras will do both to police-civilian relations and to privacy. As the debate has unfolded, it’s become clear that more and more people have lost even the language of privacy, and an understanding of why privacy is important.

Let’s start with the basics.

Privacy is important to the development of full individuals because there has to be an interior zone within each person that other people don’t see. There has to be a zone where half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions can grow and evolve, without being exposed to the harsh glare of public judgment. There has to be a place where you can be free to develop ideas and convictions away from the pressure to conform. There has to be a spot where you are only yourself and can define yourself.

Privacy is important to families and friendships because there has to be a zone where you can be fully known. There has to be a private space where you can share your doubts and secrets and expose your weaknesses with the expectation that you will still be loved and forgiven and supported.

Privacy is important for communities because there has to be a space where people with common affiliations can develop bonds of affection and trust. There has to be a boundary between us and them. Within that boundary, you look out for each other; you rally to support each other; you cut each other some slack; you share fierce common loyalties.

All these concentric circles of privacy depend on some level of shrouding. They depend on some level of secrecy and awareness of the distinction between the inner privileged space and the outer exposed space. They depend on the understanding that what happens between us stays between us.

Cop-cams chip away at that. The cameras will undermine communal bonds. Putting a camera on someone is a sign that you don’t trust him, or he doesn’t trust you. When a police officer is wearing a camera, the contact between an officer and a civilian is less likely to be like intimate friendship and more likely to be oppositional and transactional. Putting a camera on an officer means she is less likely to cut you some slack, less likely to not write that ticket, or to bend the regulations a little as a sign of mutual care.

Putting a camera on the police officer means that authority resides less in the wisdom and integrity of the officer and more in the videotape. During a trial, if a crime isn’t captured on the tape, it will be presumed to never have happened.

Cop-cams will insult families. It’s worth pointing out that less than 20 percent of police calls involve felonies, and less than 1 percent of police-citizen contacts involve police use of force. Most of the time cops are mediating disputes, helping those in distress, dealing with the mentally ill or going into some home where someone is having a meltdown. When a police officer comes into your home wearing a camera, he’s trampling on the privacy that makes a home a home. He’s recording people on what could be the worst day of their lives, and inhibiting their ability to lean on the officer for care and support.

Cop-cams insult individual dignity because the embarrassing things recorded by them will inevitably get swapped around. The videos of the naked crime victim, the berserk drunk, the screaming maniac will inevitably get posted online — as they are already. With each leak, culture gets a little coarser. The rules designed to keep the videos out of public view will inevitably be eroded and bent.

So, yes, on balance, cop-cams are a good idea. But, as a journalist, I can tell you that when I put a notebook or a camera between me and my subjects, I am creating distance between me and them. Cop-cams strike a blow for truth, but they strike a blow against relationships. Society will be more open and transparent, but less humane and trusting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/opini ... d=45305309

The Giant Rats That Save Lives

MALANJE, Angola — I’M walking in a minefield here in rural Angola, tailing a monster rat.

This is a Gambian pouched rat, a breed almost 3 feet from nose to tail, the kind of rat that gives cats nightmares. Yet this rat is a genius as well as a giant, for it has learned how to detect land mines by scent — and it’s doing its best to save humans like me from blowing up.

These rodent mine detectors have been dubbed HeroRats, and when you’re in a minefield with one that seems about right. You’re very respectful, and you just hope this HeroRat doesn’t have a stuffed nose.

I’m here because five years ago, my kids gave me a HeroRat for a Father’s Day present through GlobalGiving.org. I didn’t actually take physical possession (fortunately!) but the gift helped pay to train the rat to sniff out explosives. And now I’ve come to minefields of rural Angola to hunt for my rat.

There are 39 HeroRats here, and they underscore the way the aid world is increasingly embracing innovative approaches to old challenges.

A Gambian pouched rat clears a minefield in northern Angola.Credit Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times
I’ve seen land-mine detection in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and it’s dreadfully slow and inefficient. Typically, men in body armor walk in precise rows holding metal detectors in front of them. Whenever they come across metal, they stop and painstakingly brush away the soil until they see what it is.

Usually it’s an empty AK-47 cartridge or a nail. Sometimes there is metal every few inches. Each time, the whole process stops until the soil can be brushed away.

In contrast, the rats scamper along on leashes. They respond only to the scent of explosives, so scrap metal doesn’t slow them down.

At this minefield, which is full of metal objects, a human with a metal detector can clear only about 20 square meters a day. A rat can clear 20 times as much.

“Rats are also more reliable,” said Alfredo Adamo, a field supervisor here. “With humans, concentration wanes after a while, but rats just sniff away.”

The rats are paid in bananas, peanuts, avocados and apples, and they don’t need body armor — partly because they’re too light to set off land mines. (They can still weigh up to 2.5 pounds, which is a lot of rat when you’re face to face.)

I think I found my rat: a scraggly codger named Boban who is just the right age to have been trained when my kids sponsored the rat. Boban was named after a Tanzanian soccer star, and the handlers said he was highly dependable.

Bart Weetjens, a Belgian product designer, started the HeroRat program after puzzling about how to improve mine detection. As a boy, Weetjens had kept rats as pets, and he came across an article about the use of gerbils for tasks involving scent detection.

Weetjens then consulted rodent scholars, who suggested Gambian pouched rats, in part because they compensate for very weak eyes with a superb sense of smell. They are called “pouched” not because they are marsupials but because they fill their cheeks with nuts and other goodies, and then bury them underground — relying upon scent to recover their caches later. Another advantage of Gambian pouched rats is that they have an eight-year life span that offers a lengthy return on the nine months of training needed to detect land mines.

So Weetjens started an aid group, Apopo, that trains the rats in Tanzania and then deploys them to minefields in various countries. Apopo is also now branching off into using HeroRats to detect tuberculosis — a disease of poverty that kills 1.5 million people a year around the world.
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A huge challenge with tuberculosis is diagnosis. It takes a trained health worker with a microscope all day to examine about 25 samples of sputum to determine if they are positive for tuberculosis.

In contrast, a HeroRat can screen 100 samples in 20 minutes — ambling along a row of petri dishes, sniffing at each, and pausing when one is positive for tuberculosis. The rats are also much more accurate than a human with a microscope. In the clinics where HeroRats are now doing the detection (their diagnoses confirmed by humans in labs), the number of tuberculosis patients identified has risen 48 percent — meaning that more patients are diagnosed and treated, preventing the disease’s spread.

The hero-rats are a powerful antidote to the menacing inhumane rats that littered many parts of the world with these menacing instruments of...

As an animal rights activist I approached this article with a little trepidation. Given the utter horrors we visit upon rats, often for no...

Bart Weetjens began his career in product design, after obtaining first class honours in his degree in product design. Product design is a...

Apopo pampers the rats, which get better health care than most Angolans. The rats work only a couple of hours a day (they get hot in midday), and they retire at age 6 when they become less dependable.

“We debated what to do with them after retirement,” Adamo recalls. “It would be very unfair to just, er,” — he paused slightly, embarrassed, looking for a euphemism — “get rid of them.”

So the HeroRats spend their golden years nibbling on avocados and hanging out with their handlers. When the time comes, the handlers lay them to rest in a rodent cemetery, with several people present to pay respects.

Adamo admires the rats because he has seen the damage that land mines can do. He grew up in Mozambique in a village separated from its farming fields by a mine belt, and his grandfather lost his leg to a land mine. Three neighbor boys were killed and a fourth badly injured by a mine.

To me, HeroRats are an example of an explosion of innovation taking place in the philanthropic world — and seeing large gains in productivity as a result. We see this with cellphone apps in poor countries for savings and health, with microsaving and microinsurance, with impact investing and, yes, with animals.

Apopo is also an example of aid groups connecting donations to particular tasks in a way that donors can easily relate to. Through Apopo.org, you can “adopt” a HeroRat for $84 a year. Take it from me, this makes a terrific Mother’s Day or Father’s Day present!

The handlers grow attached to the rats and recognize each of them by face. Francisco Pedro, a 38-year-old Angolan who has worked in demining for many years, initially with a metal detector and the last three years with HeroRats, says that his affection for the rats has led to marital challenges.

“When there are rats in the house, I just shoo them away,” he said. “I can’t kill rats now.”

“But my wife can,” he added, explaining that he pleads with his wife to let the rats be. He paused for a moment, looking wounded, and said: “When I’m not at home, she kills them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opini ... pe=article

How I Got Converted to G.M.O. Food

No one claims that biotech is a silver bullet. The technology of genetic modification can’t make the rains come on time or ensure that farmers in Africa have stronger land rights. But improved seed genetics can make a contribution in all sorts of ways: It can increase disease resistance and drought tolerance, which are especially important as climate change continues to bite; and it can help tackle hidden malnutritional problems like vitamin A deficiency.

We need this technology. We must not let the green movement stand in its way.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/opini ... d=45305309

The Machines Are Coming

Today, machines can process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. They can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor.

Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. In applications around the world, software is being used to predict whether people are lying, how they feel and whom they’ll vote for.

To crack these cognitive and emotional puzzles, computers needed not only sophisticated, efficient algorithms, but also vast amounts of human-generated data, which can now be easily harvested from our digitized world. The results are dazzling. Most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being deconstructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opini ... 05309&_r=0

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Chinese Scientists Edit Genes of Human Embryos, Raising Concerns

"The Chinese researchers did not plan to produce a baby — they used defective human embryos — but did hope to end up with an embryo with a precisely altered gene in every cell but no other inadvertent DNA damage. None of the 85 human embryos they injected fulfilled those criteria. In almost every case, either the embryo died or the gene was not altered. Even the four embryos in which the targeted gene was edited had problems. Some of the embryo cells overrode the editing, resulting in embryos that were genetic mosaics. And speckled over their DNA was a sort of collateral damage — DNA mutations caused by the editing attempt."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/healt ... pe=article

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25 Years Later, Hubble Sees Beyond Troubled Start

This is an interesting exposition of the history of the Hubble, with its ups and downs and it's future...


"NASA is making a big deal of the Hubble anniversary, with a weeklong symposium in Baltimore, where the Space Telescope Science Institute is based.

“This is a celebration partly about the telescope and partly about NASA,” Dr. Grunsfeld said, “but much of it is a celebration of people doing science.”"

More including video:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/scien ... .html?_r=0

Moore’s Law Turns 50

The article below is a reflection of the exponential growth of the pocessing power of the computers over the past 50 years and the potential for the future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/opini ... 05309&_r=0

Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Humanity

If you think future wars will be fought against robots, you aren’t alone.

“Computers will overtake humans with AI [artificial intelligence] at some point within the next 100 years,” Stephen Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist, said on Tuesday at the Zeitgeist 2015 conference in London. “When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.”

AI refers to the intelligence of computer systems, allowing them to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. Apple’s Siri and self-driving cars are current examples.

Hawking also asserted that concern currently lies in who controls AI. But with technology’s rapid progression, he said, the future worry will be whether AI can be controlled at all. In December, he went a step further and said that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

The ability of a machine to kill, independent of human guidance, is one of the many fears expressed in a report jointly released by Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School in April. Its authors call for a prohibition on “the development, production and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international, legally binding instrument.”

Hawking posed another possible solution: having developers of the technology carefully coordinate advancements to ensure AI stays within our control. “Our future is a race between the growing power of technology and the wisdom with which we use it,” he said.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/techandsc ... lsignoutmd

Risks to Hands-Free Driving

A growing number of new cars have sophisticated technologies designed to prevent accidents and make driving less stressful and monotonous. Some of these advances also pose a potential problem: they could increase distracted driving.

Most automakers are not expected to sell cars that drive themselves all the time for at least several more years. But many companies like Mercedes-Benz, Tesla Motors and General Motors are already selling or working on cars that can do a lot of driving without the help of drivers. Some cars, for example, can follow cars in front of them at a safe distance on highways.

While these features can be incredibly convenient, some experts are worried that they could pose a safety hazard. Drivers in such cars — lulled into believing they can safely take their eyes off the road to text — might not be prepared to take control when something goes wrong. Only New York requires drivers to keep at least one hand on the wheel.

Even without new technologies, distracted driving is a big problem. A recent study commissioned by AT&T found that 61 percent of people admitted that they text while driving, 33 percent said they email and 27 percent said they use Facebook. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that distracted driving was involved in 16 percent of all traffic accidents reported to the police in 2013. Using a different statistical approach, the National Safety Council, a nonprofit organization, estimates that as many as 27 percent of accidents in 2013 involved people talking or texting on cellphones.

Since automated driving features are available only in a small number of luxury cars now, it is hard to know their effect. But experts are urging automakers and regulators to address the added distraction risk. Officials at Mercedes-Benz, for example, say the company’s Intelligent Drive system is designed to remind drivers to keep a hand on the steering wheel. Others at companies like Audi have demonstrated systems that monitor drivers using cameras and issue warnings when someone is not paying attention to the road.

The federal government and most states have not yet issued rules on how such features should be designed. One approach is to require that automated systems warn drivers to slow down if they are about to crash into a car or pedestrian in front of them. Other useful features can alert drivers to cars in their blind spot when they are trying to change lanes. Carmakers usually offer these and other new features as optional packages that consumers can buy separately. Over time, as the systems cost less, manufacturers make them standard equipment in some cars. In some cases, the government has forced automakers to install safety features like electronic stability control in all cars, saving thousands of lives.

There are numerous promising technologies coming down the pike. Most of them should make driving safer, as long as they are used sensibly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/29/opini ... 05309&_r=0

Software Can Read Pain By Analyzing Human Expressions
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http://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/sof ... lsignoutmd

The Case for Fetal-Cell Research

Boston — WE first acquired the stem cells from the red receptacles of a local hospital’s labor and delivery ward, delivered to our lab at the University of Southern California. I would reach into the large medical waste containers and pull out the tree-like branches of the placenta, discarded after a baby had been born. Squeezing the umbilical cord that had so recently been attached to new life, the blood, laden with stem cells, would come dripping out.

But sometimes a different package would arrive at our lab. Despite my distaste for wringing placentas, I felt more squeamish about what lay inside the unassuming white box. Packed in the ice was a crescent-shaped sliver of dark red tissue: a human liver. Just like the placentas that were discarded after birth, this tissue was originally destined for medical waste following an abortion.

Although their fates were similar, their origins couldn’t be more different. One source was the byproduct of celebration, the other a procedure often marked with stigma and shame. While under the bright focus of the microscope the cells we isolated were indistinguishable, in our minds there was a significant difference.

Stem cell science is a big deal in California, thanks to the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a state agency that has allocated almost $2 billion in research grants since 2004 (federal funding is still highly restricted). To meet the demand for cells, researchers turned to a procedure protected by federal law: abortions. The discarded tissue from terminated pregnancies, performed up to 26 weeks in California, is a rich source of stem cells.

But only certain fetal cells are useful. While embryonic stem cells, derived from fertilized eggs, can give rise to any cell that makes up the body, as fetal cells develop from the embryo they become committed to specific cell lineages. The liver and thymus, for instance, are packed with the precursor cells to the immune system, while the brain contains neural cells that form the nervous system.

To meet the need for these precursor cells, biotech companies form an essential middleman between tissue donated from abortion clinics and the research labs that need it. They ensure that informed consent is obtained, harvest the organs, in some cases isolate and purify the cells and then ship them out to laboratories. There are profits to be made by such middlemen in what critics call the abortion industry. A fetus runs upward of $850, not including testing, cleaning or shipping charges, while a vial packed with pure stem cells can fetch more than $20,000.

The use of fetal tissue in research is not new. Fetal cells extracted from the lungs of two aborted fetuses from Europe in the 1960s are still being propagated in cell culture. They’re so successful that today we still use them to produce vaccines for hepatitis A, rubella, chickenpox and shingles. From two terminated pregnancies, countless lives have been spared.

It isn’t just vaccines. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have injected neural stem cells into two patients to treat their spinal cord injuries. And progress is being made in the use of stem-cell therapies against cancer, blindness, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, H.I.V. and diabetes.

As impressive as this is, for critics the lives saved cannot make up for those that have been lost. And as important as I believe my research was, I sympathize with that sense of loss, even after leaving the lab for Boston.

Every week when the plain white FedEx box was delivered, uneasiness permeated the lab. We all knew that the tissues contained within were precious. We planned our experiments meticulously, trying not to waste a single drop. We rationalized using the cells by telling one another that the abortions would happen regardless of whether we used the tissue for research. And we knew that if we didn’t use the tissue it was bound for the trash.

Still, even with our preparations, justifications and the sheer excitement that accompanied our research, the fetal cells brought sadness. We wished we didn’t have them, despite the breakthroughs.

Perhaps this is why it was difficult to hear Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, discuss the organs of aborted fetuses so casually in surreptitiously recorded conversations with anti-abortion activists posing as fetal-tissue buyers. It’s understandable that politicians, angered by her callous tone, are investigating how fetal tissue is handled and how research is conducted, despite the strict institutional review that governs the use of anatomical tissue donated for research.

Politicians aren’t the only ones looking for answers. Scientists are searching for alternatives to fetal cells. One solution may lie in reprogramming adult cells, creating what researchers call induced pluripotent stem cells. These cells share the ancestral adaptability of embryonic stem cells, yet can also be manipulated to look and act like fetal stem cells.

And yet, every time I worked with a fetal liver, I imagined that somewhere in California a woman had made the agonizing, heartbreaking decision to end her pregnancy. Yet she had also donated her aborted fetus to medical research. I thought of this as I isolated the golden-tinged cells inside the vent hood. A promise had been made; these cells were not simply trash.

The choice I made is repeated every day, in labs all over the world. Researchers have no say in whether a fetus is aborted or develops into a human baby; those decisions are made by women and shaped by politicians. Yet their science, performed on discarded tissue, has the ability to save lives. It already has.

Nathalia Holt, a microbiologist, is the author of “Cured: The People Who Defeated HIV” and the forthcoming book “Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us From Missiles to the Moon to Mars.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/opini ... d=45305309

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Save Fetal Tissue Research, and Save Lives

Fetal cells were used to develop the original polio vaccine and are still used to make vaccines for rubella, shingles, chickenpox and an experimental Ebola vaccine. The tissue is critical for studying conditions that affect the health of fetuses and newborn infants, brain injuries in the womb that lead to cerebral palsy, and eye conditions that lead to macular degeneration.

Researchers also use it to develop treatments for H.I.V., end-stage breast cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s, among other conditions. Last year the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency that spends money only on the research that experts consider most promising, awarded $76 million in grants for fetal tissue research.

Fetal tissue is a precious medical resource. It should be exploited for the many health benefits it can provide, not banned as part of a vicious, continuing assault on Planned Parenthood and the health services it provides to millions of women a year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/opini ... ef=opinion

Why ‘Smart’ Objects May Be a Dumb Idea

A FRIDGE that puts milk on your shopping list when you run low. A safe that tallies the cash that is placed in it. A sniper rifle equipped with advanced computer technology for improved accuracy. A car that lets you stream music from the Internet.

All of these innovations sound great, until you learn the risks that this type of connectivity carries. Recently, two security researchers, sitting on a couch and armed only with laptops, remotely took over a Chrysler Jeep Cherokee speeding along the highway, shutting down its engine as an 18-wheeler truck rushed toward it. They did this all while a Wired reporter was driving the car. Their expertise would allow them to hack any Jeep as long as they knew the car’s I.P. address, its network address on the Internet. They turned the Jeep’s entertainment dashboard into a gateway to the car’s steering, brakes and transmission.

A hacked car is a high-profile example of what can go wrong with the coming Internet of Things — objects equipped with software and connected to digital networks. The selling point for these well-connected objects is added convenience and better safety. In reality, it is a fast-motion train wreck in privacy and security.

The early Internet was intended to connect people who already trusted one another, like academic researchers or military networks. It never had the robust security that today’s global network needs. As the Internet went from a few thousand users to more than three billion, attempts to strengthen security were stymied because of cost, shortsightedness and competing interests. Connecting everyday objects to this shaky, insecure base will create the Internet of Hacked Things. This is irresponsible and potentially catastrophic.

That smart safe? Hackers can empty it with a single USB stick while erasing all logs of its activity — the evidence of deposits and withdrawals — and of their crime. That high-tech rifle? Researchers managed to remotely manipulate its target selection without the shooter’s knowing.

Home builders and car manufacturers have shifted to a new business: the risky world of information technology. Most seem utterly out of their depth.

Although Chrysler quickly recalled 1.4 million Jeeps to patch this particular vulnerability, it took the company more than a year after the issue was first noted, and the recall occurred only after that spectacular publicity stunt on the highway and after it was requested by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In announcing the software fix, the company said that no defect had been found. If two guys sitting on their couch turning off a speeding car’s engine from miles away doesn’t qualify, I’m not sure what counts as a defect in Chrysler’s world. And Chrysler is far from the only company compromised: from BMW to Tesla to General Motors, many automotive brands have been hacked, with surely more to come.

Dramatic hacks attract the most attention, but the software errors that allow them to occur are ubiquitous. While complex breaches can take real effort — the Jeep hacker duo spent two years researching — simple errors in the code can also cause significant failure. Adding software with millions of lines of code to objects greatly increases their potential for harm.

The Internet of Things is also a privacy nightmare. Databases that already have too much information about us will now be bursting with data on the places we’ve driven, the food we’ve purchased and more. Last week, at Def Con, the annual information security conference, researchers set up an Internet of Things village to show how they could hack everyday objects like baby monitors, thermostats and security cameras.

Connecting everyday objects introduces new risks if done at mass scale. Take that smart refrigerator. If a single fridge malfunctions, it’s a hassle. However, if the fridge’s computer is connected to its motor, a software bug or hack could “brick” millions of them all at once — turning them into plastic pantries with heavy doors.

Cars — two-ton metal objects designed to hurtle down highways — are already bracingly dangerous. The modern automobile is run by dozens of computers that most manufacturers connect using a system that is old and known to be insecure. Yet automakers often use that flimsy system to connect all of the car’s parts. That means once a hacker is in, she’s in everywhere — engine, steering, transmission and brakes, not just the entertainment system.

For years, security researchers have been warning about the dangers of coupling so many systems in cars. Alarmed researchers have published academic papers, hacked cars as demonstrations, and begged the industry to step up. So far, the industry response has been to nod politely and fix exposed flaws without fundamentally changing the way they operate.

In 1965, Ralph Nader published “Unsafe at Any Speed,” documenting car manufacturers’ resistance to spending money on safety features like seatbelts. After public debate and finally some legislation, manufacturers were forced to incorporate safety technologies.

No company wants to be the first to bear the costs of updating the insecure computer systems that run most cars. We need federal safety regulations to push automakers to move, as a whole industry. Last month, a bill with privacy and cybersecurity standards for cars was introduced in the Senate. That’s good, but it’s only a start. We need a new understanding of car safety, and of the safety of any object running software or connecting to the Internet.

It may be hard to fix security on the digital Internet, but the Internet of Things should not be built on this faulty foundation. Responding to digital threats by patching only exposed vulnerabilities is giving just aspirin to a very ill patient.

It isn’t hopeless. We can make programs more reliable and databases more secure. Critical functions on Internet-connected objects should be isolated and external audits mandated to catch problems early. But this will require an initial investment to forestall future problems — the exact opposite of the current corporate impulse. It also may be that not everything needs to be networked, and that the trade-off in vulnerability isn’t worth it. Maybe cars are unsafe at any I.P.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/opini ... d=45305309

Robot Weapons: What’s the Harm?

LAST month over a thousand scientists and tech-world luminaries, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak, released an open letter calling for a global ban on offensive “autonomous” weapons like drones, which can identify and attack targets without having to rely on a human to make a decision.

The letter, which warned that such weapons could set off a destabilizing global arms race, taps into a growing fear among experts and the public that artificial intelligence could easily slip out of humanity’s control — much of the subsequent coverage online was illustrated with screen shots from the “Terminator” films.

The specter of autonomous weapons may evoke images of killer robots, but most applications are likely to be decidedly more pedestrian. Indeed, while there are certainly risks involved, the potential benefits of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — to soldiers, civilians and global stability — are also significant.

The authors of the letter liken A.I.-based weapons to chemical and biological munitions, space-based nuclear missiles and blinding lasers. But this comparison doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. However high-tech those systems are in design, in their application they are “dumb” — and, particularly in the case of chemical and biological weapons, impossible to control once deployed.

A.I.-based weapons, in contrast, offer the possibility of selectively sparing the lives of noncombatants, limiting their use to precise geographical boundaries or times, or ceasing operation upon command (or the lack of a command to continue).

Consider the lowly land mine. Those horrific and indiscriminate weapons detonate when stepped on, causing injury, death or damage to anyone or anything that happens upon them. They make a simple-minded “decision” whether to detonate by sensing their environment — and often continue to do so, long after the fighting has stopped.

Now imagine such a weapon enhanced by an A.I. technology less sophisticated than what is found in most smartphones. An inexpensive camera, in conjunction with other sensors, could discriminate among adults, children and animals; observe whether a person in its vicinity is wearing a uniform or carrying a weapon; or target only military vehicles, instead of civilian cars.

This would be a substantial improvement over the current state of the art, yet such a device would qualify as an offensive autonomous weapon of the sort the open letter proposes to ban.

Then there’s the question of whether a machine — say, an A.I.-enabled helicopter drone — might be more effective than a human at making targeting decisions. In the heat of battle, a soldier may be tempted to return fire indiscriminately, in part to save his or her own life. By contrast, a machine won’t grow impatient or scared, be swayed by prejudice or hate, willfully ignore orders or be motivated by an instinct for self-preservation.

Indeed, many A.I. researchers argue for speedy deployment of self-driving cars on similar grounds: Vigilant electronics may save lives currently lost because of poor split-second decisions made by humans. How many soldiers in the field might die waiting for the person exercising “meaningful human control” to approve an action that a computer could initiate instantly?

Neither human nor machine is perfect, but as the philosopher B. J. Strawser has recently argued, leaders who send soldiers into war “have a duty to protect an agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent’s ability to act justly.” In other words, if an A.I. weapons system can get a dangerous job done in the place of a human, we have a moral obligation to use it.

Of course, there are all sorts of caveats. The technology has to be as effective as a human soldier. It has to be fully controllable. All this needs to be demonstrated, of course, but presupposing the answer is not the best path forward. In any case, a ban wouldn’t be effective. As the authors of the letter recognize, A.I. weapons aren’t rocket science; they don’t require advanced knowledge or enormous resource expenditures, so they may be widely available to adversaries that adhere to different ethical standards.

The world should approach A.I. weapons as an engineering problem — to establish internationally sanctioned weapons standards, mandate proper testing and formulate reasonable post-deployment controls — rather than by forgoing the prospect of potentially safer and more effective weapons.

Instead of turning the planet into a “Terminator”-like battlefield, machines may be able to pierce the fog of war better than humans can, offering at least the possibility of a more humane and secure world. We deserve a chance to find out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/opini ... d=45305309

The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t

In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magaz ... 05309&_r=0

The Controversial Way More Parents Are Choosing Their Baby's Gender

More and more couples are using pricey fertility treatments not because they're having trouble conceiving, but because they want to choose their baby's gender, Wall Street Journal reports.

The process, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, is usually used ​to test for genetic diseases, but can also be used to determine a baby's sex, and the price tag of up to $15,000 to $20,000 per cycle (and the fact it's not available in many countries outside the U.S. and Mexico yet) doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from getting them.

According to Southern California fertility clinic network HRC Fertility, approximately 1 in 5 couples who come in to their facilities for fertility treatments are getting them specifically so they can choose the sex of their baby.

Daniel Potter, medical director of HRC Fertility, says that much of network's current growth is coming from people who fit this exact description, outweighing same-sex couples and couples with genetic diseases.

Despite the growing interest in the service, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists ethics committee says they "don't want people to use technology that's really intended to help couples with medical needs for nonmedical reasons," even if there are minimal health risks involved.

Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University School of Medicine, agrees, saying that allowing families fertility treatments so they can only produce the sex of their choice could easily turn into a situation where everyone only wants babies of a particular sex.

Some clinics the Wall Street Journal spoke with said they got more requests for girls than boys while other clinics said the requests were pretty evenly split.

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/pregnan ... lsignoutmd

VW Scandal Shows a Need for More Tech, Not Less

You could be forgiven for reacting to the Volkswagen scandal by yearning for the halcyon era of dumb cars. Remember when our rides weren’t controlled by secret, corrupt software — when your father’s Oldsmobile was solidly mechanical and so simple in its operation that even a government regulator could understand it?

But emotionally attractive as it might be, the analog automobile isn’t a realistic option (which is perhaps why even Luddites aren’t asking for it). The real lesson in VW’s scandal — in which the automaker installed “defeat devices” that showed the cars emitting lower emissions in lab tests than they actually did — is not that our cars are stuffed with too much technology. Instead, the lesson is that there isn’t enough tech in vehicles.

In fact, the faster we upgrade our roads and autos with better capabilities to detect and analyze what’s going on in the transportation system, the better we’ll be able to find hackers, cheaters and others looking to create havoc on the highways.
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Right now we are at an awkward in-between phase in the transformation of the automobile — somewhere in the uncanny valley between the mechanical horse of Henry Ford’s era and the intelligent, autonomous, emissions-free, crash-free, networked fleet that will begin chugging along our roads later this century. This transition period will mean short-term turmoil. Cars today are lousy with code that can’t be inspected, opening the way for scary hackings and cheats and also the unforeseen complications of interactions between robots and humans.

Some of these problems call for obvious fixes. As many have pointed out since the VW admission, the code in our cars (and other life-threatening machines) shouldn’t be secret, but should allow for better inspection by authorities and independent experts. Another obvious fix is to replace the sort of lab-testing that VW was able to game with the kind of real-world analysis that uncovered its chicanery.

But to do that, we’ll need more technology, not less. We need more sensors in cars and on roads and a network of computers watching the data to figure out when vehicles are behaving in aberrant ways. In other words, the best way to prevent cheating isn’t to make our cars dumber, but to make the entire transportation grid smarter.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/techn ... d=71987722

Manipulating Faces From Afar in Realtime

Video at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/scien ... d=71987722

Moviegoers and electronic game players have grown accustomed to digital manipulation of all sorts of still and moving images.

But even the most jaded among them might be surprised by a process that computer scientists in California and Germany have developed to instantaneously transfer facial expressions.

With the new technique, one person’s smile appears seamlessly on live video of another person’s face, even though the second person is not smiling at all.

A computer processes the transfer in 30 milliseconds, no time at all for a human observer, although less expensive cameras can result in a bit of a lag.

The researchers demonstrate their technique with simultaneous live video from two people, and the result is at least mildly disturbing. Presentations that show unadulterated videos of two people along with the manipulated ones prompt the viewer to keep looking from real to unreal, feeling that something is just not right.

Matthias Niessner, a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University who works on the rendering of three-dimensional surfaces in computer graphics, refers to the process as “live facial re-enactment.”

Dr. Niessner, along with Justus Thies, a graduate student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where Dr. Niessner studied, and other colleagues at Stanford and in Germany used the kind of camera that captures gestures in three dimensions, as in the Microsoft Kinect.

Software that they developed maps every pixel on both faces, and then transfers the expression. The speed of the process comes partly because the software runs on a number of computer processors at once.

Dr. Niessner said he envisioned the technique’s being used to improve dubbing in movies, to make video in virtual reality more realistic, and to provide instantaneous translation.

Skype has already released a preview of nearly real-time voice translation during video calls. Dr. Niessner said that with further work, real-time transfer of facial expressions could be combined with real-time translation. Then, for example, if an English speaker were talking to a Mandarin speaker, each would appear to be speaking the other’s language.

Dr. Niessner said that when programs like Photoshop first appeared, there was some concern about the dangers of altering visual reality. But now, he said, “The whole advertisement industry is kind of living on Photoshop.” The public has adjusted, and there are techniques to detect any surreptitious alteration of an image. The same would be true with facial re-enactment, he said.

The researchers are scheduled to present their work at Siggraph Asia 2015 in Kobe, Japan, next week. Their paper will then be published in the proceedings of the conference, a special issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics.

Once the technique becomes popular, it’s reasonable to expect that talking animal videos will become more popular than ever.

Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age

Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction.

Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for.

“Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/ha ... 87722&_r=0

Student launches solar backpack for Kenyan school children

Former Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa, student Salima Visram has become a social entrepreneur even as she studies as an undergraduate in Canada, with the launch of a crowd-funded Kenyan business producing school students’ backpacks that create solar lighting for pupils to do their homework.

The business, last month, delivered its first 500 back packs in Kikambala Primary School, in Mombasa County.

“Studying at the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa greatly improved my leadership skills and helped me grow my community development skills. I received an educational experience beyond the classroom that helped me learn about the real-world implications of what i was studying,” said Salima.

Some 92 per cent of rural households in Kenya use kerosene to fuel lighting. When night falls, this sees millions of Kenyan school children forced to rely on the toxic and expensive light source to do their homework. For those who cannot keep up with the expense of buying the fuel, learning stops when the sun goes down, according to a report compiled by lighting company Sunny Money in Kenya.

Salima grew up in Kikambala witnessing the effects that poverty and the lack of electricity had on school going children and came up with the solar back pack, which she calls the Soular Backpack. The backpack allows children in rural areas to leverage the power of the sun during their long walks to and from school to provide light for reading at night.

The back packs consist of a solar panel, a battery pack and an LED lamp. The solar panel stores solar power during the day and allows the LED lamp to be connected to it during the night as a light source. For four hours of charging, the back pack is able to give out seven to eight hours of light a night.

In January, Visram raised $38,000 (Sh3,990,000) through crowd-funding platform Indiegogo, which she used to place the first order of 2,000 backpacks to distribute to the Kikambala village as a pilot project.

“If successful, I want to expand the project to a hundred schools in the county within the next year and a half. This is in direct alignment with Kenya’s Vision 2030 “Masomo Bora”, which is the nation’s effort to ensure that all children are educated, and realize their full potential,” said Visram.

Salima Visram is now in her final year of studying International Development Studies at McGill University, in Montreal, having been at Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa, for her secondary school education. She believes social business is the greatest catalyst in creating sustainable change, and hopes to form partnerships with UNICEF, the UNHCR and the Government of Kenya to expand the project to other parts of Kenya and Africa. Her goal is that through education, people will be given the tools to empower and alleviate themselves from poverty.

“Salima’s vision and implementation demonstrate the power and importance of empowering our students to create solutions to the problems that are hampering Kenya’s development, and we see her emerging rapidly as a role model for all that the Academy stands for, and its mission in positioning talented young students as future leaders driving change and poverty alleviation for all,” said Mr Bill O’Hearn, Head of Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa.

Staff Writer
http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2015/10/stu ... rettyPhoto

In 5 Minutes, He Lets the Blind See

HETAUDA, Nepal — WATCHING the doctor perform is like observing miracles.

He has restored eyesight to more than 100,000 people, perhaps more than any doctor in history, and still his patients come. They stagger and grope their way to him along mountain trails from remote villages, hoping to go under his scalpel and see loved ones again.

A day after he operates to remove cataracts, he pulls off the bandages — and, lo! They can see clearly. At first tentatively, then jubilantly, they gaze about. A few hours later, they walk home, radiating an ineffable bliss. Dr. Sanduk Ruit, a Nepali ophthalmologist, may be the world champion in the war on blindness. Some 39 million people worldwide are blind — about half because of cataracts — and another 246 million have impaired vision, according to the World Health Organization.

If you’re a blind person in a poor country, then traditionally you have no hope. But Dr. Ruit has pioneered a simple cataract microsurgery technique that costs only $25 per patient and is virtually always successful. Indeed, his “Nepal method” is now taught in United States medical schools.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opini ... ef=opinion

Uterus Transplants May Soon Help Some Infertile Women in the U.S. Become Pregnant

CLEVELAND — Six doctors swarmed around the body of the deceased organ donor and quickly started to operate.

The kidneys came out first. Then the team began another delicate dissection, to remove an organ that is rarely, if ever, taken from a donor. Ninety minutes later they had it, resting in the palm of a surgeon’s hand: the uterus.

The operation was a practice run. Within the next few months, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic expect to become the first in the United States to transplant a uterus into a woman who lacks one, so that she can become pregnant and give birth. The recipients will be women who were born without a uterus, had it removed or have uterine damage. The transplants will be temporary: The uterus would be removed after the recipient has had one or two babies, so she can stop taking transplant anti-rejection drugs.

Uterine transplantation is a new frontier, one that pairs specialists from two fields known for innovation and for pushing limits, medically and ethically — reproductive medicine and transplant surgery. If the procedure works, many women could benefit: An estimated 50,000 women in the United States might be candidates. But there are potential dangers.

The recipients, healthy women, will face the risks of surgery and anti-rejection drugs for a transplant that they, unlike someone with heart or liver failure, do not need to save their lives. Their pregnancies will be considered high-risk, with fetuses exposed to anti-rejection drugs and developing inside a womb taken from a dead woman.

Eight women from around the country have begun the screening process at the Cleveland Clinic, hoping to be selected for transplants. One, a 26-year-old with two adopted children, said she still wanted a chance to become pregnant and give birth.

“I crave that experience,” she said. “I want the morning sickness, the backaches, the feet swelling. I want to feel the baby move. That is something I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.”

She traveled more than 1,000 miles to the clinic, paying her own way. She asked that her name and hometown be withheld to protect her family’s privacy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/healt ... 87722&_r=0

Engineering Mosquitoes’ Genes to Resist Malaria

In a basement on the Irvine campus of the University of California, behind a series of five protective doors, two teams of biologists have created a novel breed of mosquito that they hope will help eradicate malaria from the world.

The mosquito has been engineered to carry two ingenious genetic modifications. One is a set of genes that spew out antibodies to the malarial parasite harbored by the mosquito. Mosquitoes with these genes are rendered resistant to the parasite and so cannot spread malaria.

The other modification is a set of genetic elements known as a gene drive that should propel the malaria-resistance genes throughout a natural mosquito population. When a malaria-resistant male mosquito mates with a wild female, the gene drive copies both itself and the resistance genes over from the male chromosome to its female counterpart.

Because almost all the progeny carry the new genes, instead of just 50 percent as would be expected by Mendel’s laws of genetics, the inserted genes are expected to spread rapidly and take over a wild population in as few as 10 generations, or a single season. A large region, at least in principle, could be freed from malaria, which kills almost 600,000 people a year.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/scien ... 87722&_r=0

The New Atomic Age We Need

THIS past summer, the Group of 7 nations promised “urgent and concrete action” to limit climate change. What actions exactly? Activists hope for answers from the coming United Nations climate conference in Paris, which begins Monday. They should look instead to Washington today.

The single most important action we can take is thawing a nuclear energy policy that keeps our technology frozen in time. If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one.

We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. This is most obvious in poor countries, where billions dream of living like Americans. The easiest way to satisfy this demand for a better life has been to burn more coal: In the past decade alone, China added more coal-burning capacity than America has ever had. But even though average Indians and Chinese use less than 30 percent as much electricity as Americans, the air they breathe is far worse. They deserve a third option besides dire poverty or dirty skies.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/opini ... 87722&_r=0

Scientists Seek Moratorium on Edits to Human Genome That Could Be Inherited

An international group of scientists meeting in Washington called on Thursday for what would, in effect, be a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome.

The group said it would be “irresponsible to proceed” until the risks could be better assessed and until there was “broad societal consensus about the appropriateness” of any proposed change. The group also held open the possibility for such work to proceed in the future by saying that as knowledge advances, the issue of making permanent changes to the human genome “should be revisited on a regular basis.”

The meeting was convened by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the Institute of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. The academies have no regulatory power, but their moral authority on this issue seems very likely to be accepted by scientists in most or all countries. Similar restraints proposed in 1975 on an earlier form of gene manipulation by an international scientific meeting in California were observed by the world’s scientists.

“The overriding question is when, if ever, we will want to use gene editing to change human inheritance,” David Baltimore said in opening the conference this week. The participation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is a notable achievement for the organizers of the meeting, led by Dr. Baltimore, former president of the California Institute of Technology, given that earlier in the year Chinese scientists seemed to be racing ahead independently toward clinical alterations to the human germline.

The meeting was prompted by a new genetic technique, invented three years ago, that enables DNA to be edited with unprecedented ease and precision. The technique, known as Crispr-Cas9 and now widely accessible, would allow physicians to alter the human germline, which includes the eggs and the sperm, to cure genetic disease or even enhance desirable physical or mental traits.

Unlike gene therapy, an accepted medical technique that alters the body’s ordinary tissues, editorial changes made to the human germline would be inherited by the patient’s children and thus contribute permanent changes to the human gene pool. These, if sufficiently extensive, might, in principle, alter the nature of the human species.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/scien ... d=71987722