Archives for October 2021

LONDON (AP) — A top British government official is backing a phone company’s proposal for a new tracking service to help protect women walking alone, an idea pitched amid ongoing outrage over the slayings of two young women who were targeted near their homes in London.

The chief executive of Britain’s biggest phone company, BT, proposed the “walk me home” service in a letter to Home Secretary Priti Patel. Once a woman activated an app on her phone, the service would track her journey and send an alert to her emergency contacts if she didn’t reach her destination on time, Philip Jansen said in the letter.

The U.K. Home Office confirmed Patel had received the letter and would respond in “due course.” Patel was more supportive in comments to the Daily Mail.

“This new phone line is exactly the kind of innovative scheme which would be good to get going as soon as we can,’’ the newspaper quoted her as saying. “I’m now looking at it with my team and liaising with BT.”

The “walk me home’’ service could be up and running by Christmas, the Mail reported.

The service would complement Britain’s existing nationwide emergency number, Jansen said. BT has run Britain’s 999 emergency number for 84 years and is currently upgrading the system.

In March, Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive, was abducted, raped and killed by a serving police officer who was convicted of murder and other charges this month and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Primary school teacher Sabina Nessa, 28, was killed six months later as she walked through a park in south London on her way to meet a friend.

“Male violence is causing so many people , especially women, to live in fear,” Jansen wrote in the Daily Mail. “And their parents, partners and friends worry too, more now than ever. …

“I am not a politician, I can’t change society, but if I can use innovative technology to improve personal safety, then I am determined to do so.” he said.

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GENEVA (AP) — Switzerland’s foreign minister says concerns about a “new Cold War” over science and technology are a major reason behind the creation of a new think tank that looks out for future advances and development — so that the whole world can benefit, not just rich countries.

Ignazio Cassis delivered a video message for the inaugural “summit” on Thursday and Friday of the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator, or GESDA, a Swiss government-backed project that aims to bridge government policy and science in an international city known for both.

“There is a growing feeling that a new Cold War is about to be fought over science and technology, and the power they confer to the states that master them,” he said. GESDA, which brings together hundreds of scientists and policymakers worldwide, would serve as an “honest broker” that helps spread the benefits of science to countries rich and poor, he said.

“What we are trying to achieve with GESDA is new, and hence, difficult: To link anticipation that looks far ahead, with action that is immediate is a major challenge in itself,” Cassis said.

While conceived in 2019, GESDA has started to look prescient during the COVID-19 pandemic that caught many governments off guard, drew an uncertain or unclear response by health policy makers like the Geneva-based World Health Organization, and has exposed gaping inequality between the rich countries that have wide access to vaccines — and poor countries that don’t.

Pandemic preparedness projects and monitoring bodies have popped up in places like Europe and the United States since the outbreak, and the Biden administration has shown interest in the GESDA project -– and its focus on anticipating future trends and developments.

Alondra Nelson, deputy director for science and society for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted U.S. President Joe Biden has spoken about today’s moment “of great peril and great promise,” and she said governments should be bold about both innovation and partnership.

“I think that the Anticipator — anticipatory frame — is a fantastic possibility for working this through,” she said by videoconference from Washington on Thursday. “Anticipation is filled, of course, with both enthusiasm and yet unease.”

Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust charity and a key player in international health policy, has lined up with GESDA and told reporters on Thursday that while science has made great strides, action must be taken because otherwise “scientific advances will increasingly be available to a small elite in the world — and not to everybody.”

Last week, GESDA and XPrize announced the creation of a prize for developments in quantum computing. But GESDA, a self-dubbed “do tank,” has far broader ambitions such as helping set up a global court for scientific disputes and a Manhattan Project-style effort to rid excess carbon from the atmosphere.

It brings together hundreds of U.N. officials, Nobel laureates, academics, diplomats, advocacy group representatives and members of the public. Backers include Swiss universities and Geneva-based CERN — home to a lab with the world’s largest atom smasher.

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KAMINO KAWA, Japan (AP) — Nissan’s “intelligent factory” hardly has any human workers. The robots do the work, including welding and mounting. They do the paint jobs and inspect their own paint jobs.

“Up to now, people had to make production adjustments through experience, but now robots with artificial intelligence, analyzing collected data, are able to do it. The technology has developed to that level,” Nissan Executive Vice President Hideyuki Sakamoto said during a tour of the production line for the Ariya sport-utility vehicle at its Tochigi plant Friday.

The factory, on the outskirts of Tokyo, is set to be up and running sometime before April, according to Nissan Motor Co.

Its assembly line is designed so that all three types of models — electric; e-Power, which has both a motor and an engine, and those powered by regular combustion engine — can be built on the same line. Each vehicle is equipped with the right powertrain as it moves along the line.

The workers at the factory can focus on more skilled work such as analyzing data collected by the robots, and on maintaining the equipment.

All automakers are working on robotic technology that can increase adaptability and enable them to respond quickly to market demand.

During the tour, giant mechanical arms equipped with large displays shone light from the displays on to the car’s surfaces from various angles so that cameras could detect the tiniest flaws.

A mechanism quickly wound wires around a metal object that looked like a giant spool, a motor part that Nissan is using to replace magnets now used in electric vehicles. The company says the innovation eliminates the need for rare earth materials, cutting costs.

Nissan said the innovations being tested in Tochigi will be gradually rolled out at its other global plants, including French alliance partner Renault’s factories.

Sakamoto said it was difficult to estimate exactly how much the fully automated assembly line will save.

But he said manufacturing needs to adapt to labor shortages, to the coronavirus pandemic and to lower carbon emissions to help mitigate climate change.

Nissan says that by 2050 it hopes to achieve carbon neutrality across its operations and the life cycle of its products, which includes raw material extraction, manufacturing, use and recycling.

A new kind of paint that enables vehicles’ bodies and bumpers to be simultaneously painted and baked reduces energy consumption by 25%, the company says.

Before, vehicle bodies, which are aluminum, and plastic bumpers had to be painted separately at different temperatures.

Nissan is expecting to regain profitability in this fiscal year, but like other automakers, it is contending with parts shortages caused by the pandemic. Its brand took a hit from a scandal centered on its former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, who was arrested in Japan on financial misconduct charges in 2018.

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Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly all Americans agree that the rampant spread of misinformation is a problem.

Most also think social media companies, and the people that use them, bear a good deal of blame for the situation. But few are very concerned that they themselves might be responsible, according to a new poll from The Pearson Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Ninety-five percent of Americans identified misinformation as a problem when they’re trying to access important information. About half put a great deal of blame on the U.S. government, and about three-quarters point to social media users and tech companies. Yet only 2 in 10 Americans say they’re very concerned that they have personally spread misinformation.

More, about 6 in 10, are at least somewhat concerned that their friends or family members have been part of the problem.

For Carmen Speller, a 33-year-old graduate student in Lexington, Kentucky, the divisions are evident when she’s discussing the coronavirus pandemic with close family members. Speller trusts COVID-19 vaccines; her family does not. She believes the misinformation her family has seen on TV or read on questionable news sites has swayed them in their decision to stay unvaccinated against COVID-19.

In fact, some of her family members think she’s crazy for trusting the government for information about COVID-19.

“I do feel like they believe I’m misinformed. I’m the one that’s blindly following what the government is saying, that’s something I hear a lot,” Speller said. “It’s come to the point where it does create a lot of tension with my family and some of my friends as well.”

Speller isn’t the only one who may be having those disagreements with her family.

The survey found that 61% of Republicans say the U.S. government has a lot of responsibility for spreading misinformation, compared with just 38% of Democrats.

There’s more bipartisan agreement, however, about the role that social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, play in the spread of misinformation.

According to the poll, 79% of Republicans and 73% of Democrats said social media companies have a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for misinformation.

And that type of rare partisan agreement among Americans could spell trouble for tech giants like Facebook, the largest and most profitable of the social media platforms, which is under fire from Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike.

“The AP-NORC poll is bad news for Facebook,” said Konstantin Sonin, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago who is affiliated with the Pearson Institute. “It makes clear that assaulting Facebook is popular by a large margin — even when Congress is split 50-50, and each side has its own reasons.”

During a congressional hearing Tuesday, senators vowed to hit Facebook with new regulations after a whistleblower testified that the company’s own research shows its algorithms amplify misinformation and content that harms children.

“It has profited off spreading misinformation and disinformation and sowing hate,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said during a meeting of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. Democrats and Republicans ended the hearing with acknowledgement that regulations must be introduced to change the way Facebook amplifies its content and targets users.

The poll also revealed that Americans are willing to blame just about everybody but themselves for spreading misinformation, with 53% of them saying they’re not concerned that they’ve spread misinformation.

“We see this a lot of times where people are very worried about misinformation but they think it’s something that happens to other people — other people get fooled by it, other people spread it,” said Lisa Fazio, a Vanderbilt University psychology professor who studies how false claims spread. “Most people don’t recognize their own role in it.”

Younger adults tend to be more concerned that they’ve shared falsehoods, with 25% of those ages 18 to 29 very or extremely worried that they have spread misinformation, compared to just 14% of adults ages 60 and older. Sixty-three percent of older adults are not concerned, compared with roughly half of other Americans.

Yet it’s older adults who should be more worried about spreading misinformation, given that research shows they’re more likely to share an article from a false news website, Fazio said.

Before she shares things with family or her friends on Facebook, Speller tries her best to make sure the information she’s passing on about important topics like COVID-19 has been peer-reviewed or comes from a credible medical institution. Still, Speller acknowledges there has to have been a time or two that she “liked” or hit “share” on a post that didn’t get all the facts quite right.

“I’m sure it has happened,” Speller said. “I tend to not share things on social media that I didn’t find on verified sites. I’m open to that if someone were to point out, ‘Hey this isn’t right,’ I would think, OK, let me check this.”

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,071 adults was conducted Sept. 9-13 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

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