Month: August 2017

Tech Visionary Steve Jobs’ Life Played Out on Opera Stage

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Steve Jobs – who helped usher in the era of personal computers – has been the subject of movies and books, but his complicated life, and the ubiquitous objects he left behind, also turn out to be the stuff of opera.

“Steve Jobs’ life was complicated and messy,” notes Grammy-nominated composer Mason Bates. “He had a daughter that he didn’t acknowledge for many years; he had cancer – you can’t control that. He was while a very charismatic figure, quite a hard driving boss, and his collisions with the fact that he wanted to make everything sleek and controllable, yet life is not controllable, is (a) fascinating topic for an opera.”

Bates, who has composed dozens of symphonies and chamber works, felt that Jobs was the right subject for his first opera. Mark Campbell, one of the most prolific librettists in contemporary American opera, was not so sure.  

“I’ve had a number of socialist friends of mine saying, ‘Why would you write an opera about Steve Jobs? He was the worst capitalist!'” he recalls. His response? “Reach in your pocket; you probably have an iPhone there.”

Rather than creating a chronological life story, Campbell says the collaborators opted for a fragmented narrative to reflect the man and his machines. “Steve Jobs did have a mind that just jumped from idea to idea to idea – it was very quick. And we wanted to tell an opera that is also very quick, that jumps around.”

So The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, which premiered at the Santa Fe Opera last month, shifts back and forth in time over the course of 18 scenes. And the composer created a different musical world for each character. Since Jobs played guitar, and spent much of his time dealing with electronics, Bates gave him “this kind of busy frenetic quicksilver world of acoustic guitar and electronica.”

Jobs’ wife, Laurene, had a calming influence, helping him focus – and her sound reflects that. “Completely different space, of these kind of oceanic soulful strings.”

Other characters depicted include Jobs’ partner, Steve Wozniak, and the Japanese-born Zen priest, Kobun Chino Otogawa, who led Jobs to convert to Buddhism, and served as a mentor for much of his life. Bates says he has an “almost purely electronic world of prayer bowls and processed Thai gongs.”

The opera’s set echoes Jobs’ creations, says director Kevin Newbury. After a prologue in a replica of the iconic garage where Jobs’ ideas first took shape, the garage walls explode into six moving cubes with screens…which look a lot like iPhones.  

“We’re doing something called projection mapping where all of the scenic units have little sensors, so the video actually moves with them. We wanted to integrate it so seamlessly into the design because that’s what Steve Jobs and Apple did with the products themselves.”

Jobs’ sense of design was influenced by Japanese calligraphy, including the ensō – a circle that depicts the mind being free to let the body create. Bates says that also figures in the opera’s title: The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, with the capital “R” in parentheses.

“Of course, there’s the revolution of Steve Jobs in his creations and his devices. There’s also the evolution from a countercultural hippie, to a mogul of the world’s most valuable company. And there’s the revolution in a circle of Steve Jobs as he looks at the ensō, this piece of Japanese calligraphy, and finds that when he can kind of come full circle, he reaches the kind of completion that he sought so long in his life.”

Audiences have been wildly enthusiastic about the opera, even if the reviews from critics have been mixed. Now, it’s headed to Seattle – home to rival tech company Microsoft! – and then San Francisco, which will bring the piece full circle to the Bay area, where Steve Jobs grew up.
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In the Ruins of an Iraqi City, Memories of Agatha Christie

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Agatha Christie lived here once, but only memories remain of the time the world’s best-selling fiction writer spent among the ruins of the ancient Iraqi city of Nimrud.

The mud-brick house where the British author of Murder on the Orient Express once stayed is long gone. If she were alive today, she would probably be shocked by what has befallen the Assyrian city where she worked alongside her archaeologist husband five decades ago.

Islamic State attacked Nimrud with bulldozers, jackhammers and dynamite three years ago as part of their general assault on Iraq’s cultural heritage.

Iraqi military forces retook the site early in their campaign to drive the jihadists out of Mosul, which lies about 30 km (20 miles) north.

The house where Christie lived on site was knocked down some years before that, and the people who knew her have all died.

But her name still stirs recognition among locals, although most do not know what she is famous for.

 

“We just know that she was British,” said Abu Ammar, who lives in the closest village to the ruins.

Famed for her detectives — Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot — Christie is listed by Guinness World Records as the best-selling fiction author of all time. Her 78 crime novels have sold 2 billion copies in 44 languages.

Christie first visited Iraq before it gained independence from Britain in 1932 and met the man she would marry on an archaeological dig in the south.

The couple spent time in Mosul, and eventually moved to Nimrud.

“What a beautiful spot it was,” she wrote. “The Tigris was just a mile away, and on the great mound of the Acropolis, big stone Assyrian heads poked out of the soil. It was a spectacular stretch of country — peaceful, romantic and impregnated with the past.”

That description stands in contrast to the present.

The mound on which the ruins are situated has a fresh crown of razor wire to keep looters out, and until recently, corpses floated down the river Tigris from battlefields upstream.

Winged bull statues

Colossal winged bull statues — or lamassus — that stood guard at the entrance to a palace lie dismembered in a heap.

“Look, there’s a foot,” said Iraqi army Captain Ali Adnan, pointing out a giant talon carved from a slab of stone. Feathers and cuneiform letters are chiseled into other fragments.

Much of it was unearthed during the 1950s by Christie’s husband, Max Mallowan, who wrote the book Nimrud and its Remains.

Christie’s own interest in archaeology is evident in Death on the Nile and Murder in Mesopotamia.

Christie began writing her autobiography in Nimrud. However, she spent most of her time there documenting Mallowan’s work in photographs, and cleaning ivories dug up from the ruins, using her own face cream to coax dirt out of the crevices.

Mohammed Saeed is too young to have met Christie, but he is familiar with her legend.

A local man, he has worked on excavations at Nimrud since 1996, and used to show tourists around in less turbulent times.

“Here was Agatha Christie’s room,” he said, standing on a nondescript patch of scorched ground at the edge of the mound. “Now nothing is left.”

Bulldozers, destruction

Saeed was present when Islamic State took over and remained as a guard at the site until he started receiving threats from the militants.

Over the following months, he saw bulldozers at work on the mound, and at night, cars came and went. He suspected they were traders inspecting what could be sold to fill Islamic State’s coffers. A year later, the militants blew up the site.

“I can’t describe how I felt. My brothers thought I was going to die,” said Saeed. “The ruins are a symbol — a civilization. They represent this nation.”

It is a feeling he believes Christie would have shared: “She probably would have collapsed,” he said.

There is hope, however. Saeed said there were plans to begin excavating the southern palace next spring.

As Christie prepared to leave Nimrud, she wrote: “Now Nimrud sleeps. We have scarred it with our bulldozers. Its yawning pits have been filled in with raw earth. One day its wounds will have healed, and it will bloom once again with early spring flowers. … Who shall disturb it next? We do not know.”
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Vietnamese Artists Explore Impact of Politics, Ideologies on Life, Death

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A New Orleanslike musical funeral procession with a band set in Vietnam and a transgender fire-eater are all a part of a multimedia traveling exhibit by a Ho Chi Minh City-based artist collective called The Propeller Group.

The exhibit is showing at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.

Vietnamese-American Brittany Trinh has seen the exhibit more than once. The film titled, The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music, is Trinh’s favorite piece in the exhibit.

“First it was the music and then the way that it was being filmed, and I just felt like I was a part of it.” Trinh said, “I just felt really connected to it in a strange way.”

The Propeller Group’s origins

Founded in 2006, three artists make up the core of The Propeller Group: Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, and Matt Lucero. All have multicultural backgrounds.

Two of these founders were born in Vietnam and had to leave the country with their families because of the Vietnam War. Lucero is Native American with Spanish roots. All three grew up and were educated in countries including the United States and Singapore before going to Vietnam to live and work as artists.

“It was the end of the Vietnam War, and then the Cold War occupied so much of our kind of upbringing until, you know the early ’90s. And so that had always kind of affected how we thought and become something that haunted us,” Nguyen said.

These artists have backgrounds in filmmaking, but they found shooting video in public in Communist Vietnam was difficult, and their cameras were almost confiscated. To work around this, they formed an advertising firm that allowed them more freedom to shoot video in public.

“You’ll see propaganda and really slick advertising, and that was the space that Vietnam was in, and that was the space the Propeller Group came out of, looking at those kind of dichotomies and those collisions and ideologies,” Nguyen said.

“We were doing the advertising, the commercial work by day, and by night we were kind of developing our own artistic conceptual practice,” he said.

US exhibit

While the group rarely is allowed to show its work in Vietnam because of censorship, there is a traveling exhibit of its work showing in the United States. Themes of life and death can be seen in the pieces of multimedia works of art.

One film in the exhibit looks at the Vietnamese rituals surrounding funerals, which includes a transgender fire-eater.

“It’s a moment for them to perform and to express themselves without being stopped by the police. Then it becomes a moment of resistance in public as well, that’s one thing that kind of drew us to looking at these rituals and these traditions,” Nguyen said. “It’s (rituals) something that’s always in flux, and I think part of that comes from the many, many kinds of wars that Vietnam has been engaged in over the last few centuries,” he said.

How people die and live as a result of politics and ideologies and the impact of globalism also are themes seen in a time-lapse video of what happens when a motorcycle called the Honda Dream is left outside overnight in Vietnam. The motorcycle was stripped bare.

“So this motorbike that was once a symbol of the future and of economic mobility now is a symbol for something else. The Honda Dream becomes this physical manifestation of how ideas of capital and communism have kind of shifted over the last 10, 15, 20 years in a communist society,” Nguyen said.

Exhibit well received

The exhibit’s Houston curator says the city’s Vietnamese American community has been especially receptive to this exhibit.

“Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the United States. It’s also one of the cities that has one of the largest populations of Vietnamese. This exhibition will resonate and will bring forth questions and will open conversations about the identity of Vietnamese Americans,” said Javier Sanchez Martinez, Blaffer Art Museum’s Curatorial Fellow.

Nguyen says he hopes the exhibit will inspire the audience to re-examine how they think about history and the different narratives that affect their current way of thought.

The exhibit is organized by Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston’s Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Phoenix Art Museum.

The Propeller Group’s exhibit will travel next to the San Jose Museum of Art.
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Vietnamese Artists Explore Politics & Ideologies’s Impact on Life and Death

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There is an emerging contemporary art scene in Vietnam, and it includes a collective of Ho Chi Minh City-based artists who come from multicultural backgrounds called The Propeller Group. While the group rarely shows its work in Vietnam because of censorship, there is a traveling exhibit of its work in the U.S. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports on how themes of the Cold War, life and death are represented in the multimedia exhibit now in Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.
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Toyota, Mazda to Build, Share New Plant in US

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Japanese automakers Toyota Motor Corp. and Mazda Motor Corp. said Friday they plan to spend $1.6 billion to set up a joint-venture auto manufacturing plant in the U.S. — a move that will create up to 4,000 jobs. 

 

The plant will have an annual production capacity of about 300,000 vehicles and will produce Toyota Corollas for the North American market. Mazda will make cross-over models there that it plans to introduce to that market, both sides said.

The companies will split the cost for the plant equally. 

Toyota said that it changed its plan to make Corollas at a plant in Mexico, now under construction, and instead will produce Tacoma pickups there. 

 

EV rumors

The Japanese automakers were reportedly planning to work together to develop electric vehicles. 

EVs have become an increasingly competitive market segment because of concerns about global warming and the environment.

 

Japanese rival Nissan Motor Co., which is allied with Renault SA of France and Mitsubishi Motors Corp., is the global leader in electric vehicles.

Better batteries

 

In the past, Toyota, which makes the Prius hybrid, Camry sedan and Lexus luxury models, was not overly bullish on electric vehicles, noting the limited cruise range of the technology. But recent breakthroughs in batteries allow for longer travel per charge.

 

In 2015, Toyota and Mazda agreed to find new areas where they can work together, but they had not announced specifics.

 

Toyota already provides hybrid technology to Mazda, which also makes compact cars for Toyota at its Mexico plant.

 

Mazda, based in Hiroshima, Japan, used to have a powerful partner in Dearborn-based Ford Motor Co., which bought 25 percent of Mazda in 1979, and raised it to 33.4 percent in 1996. But Ford began cutting ties in 2008, and has shed its stake in Mazda.
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Scientists Design a Pollution-Hunting Robot

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According to the Pacific Institute, more than 2 million tons of all kinds of waste are poured into the world’s waters every day. Scientists have gotten good at detecting it, but not so good at finding where it’s coming from. Swiss researchers are working on a solution to that problem: a swimming robot that can patrol waterways 24-7 and locate pollution at its source. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Middle School Student Tackles Cancer Cure

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Today’s children are tomorrow’s leaders. Cultivating curiosity and recognizing its value in those kids might be what cures today’s incurable diseases in the future, or prevents them altogether. So what drives and inspires a 12-year-old to think about researching a cure for cancer when he’s picking a science fair project? Bronwyn Benito has the story.
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London Matisse Exhibit Shows Objects That Inspired His Art

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The art of French painter Henri Matisse is enough to draw a visitor to any gallery. The painter was drawn to art himself and during his lifetime gathered a collection of objects from around the world that inspired his art. London’s Royal Academy of Arts has staged a unique exhibit showing Matisse’s art collection along with the paintings it inspired. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Paris Olympics Aims to Regenerate Poor, Northeastern Suburbs

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One of the most deprived suburbs in Paris is expected to be a big winner now the French capital is in line to host the 2024 Olympics with thousands of homes and a new swimming center to be built in Seine-Saint-Denis for the games.

The poorest of France’s 101 mainland departments, Seine-Saint-Denis sprawls east and north from Paris, much of it a drab expanse of grey buildings, abandoned factories and poverty.

Paris learned on Monday that it was a near certainty to be the IOC’s chosen host for the 2024 games when its only remaining rival, Los Angeles, agreed to wait another four years. Budapest, Boston, Hamburg and Rome had all pulled out of the race.

“La Joie est Libre! (Joy Ahead!),” said the front-page headline of L’Equipe sports newspaper, welcoming the news with a play on words. A series of Islamist militant attacks frightened away many visitors from the French capital and city officials hope winning the bid will boost tourism.

Organizers of the games say their aim to lift Seine-Saint-Denis’s fortunes helped their case with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

“Bearing in mind the symbolic and real divides which there sometimes still are between Paris and its suburbs, this young, working class place, with young people of all colors and all origins allows us to say to the IOC that these games are a wonderful opportunity to show that Paris is bigger than Paris,” Stephane Troussel, president of Seine-Saint-Denis, told Reuters.

Tony Estanguet, co-chair of the Paris bid, said: “We looked at the success of the games in London and for sure, the fact that London succeeded in leaving a strong legacy, a physical legacy in the east of London, was very important for us.”

Not Convinced

Not all locals are sure of the benefits however. Some have half an eye on Stratford, a swath of east London that was redeveloped for the 2012 games, but where rising rents have pushed locals out of similarly created new housing there.

“When there is a lot of investment landlords will also take advantage by adding a bit, increasing the rents,” said Fode Abass Toure, a 45-year-old resident of Bobigny.

“And even the restaurants will try to increase prices of products because a lot of tourists will come,” he said.

Seine-Saint-Denis has a reputation as a Socialist bastion where the French Communist Party and hard-left have a strong presence. It was in the area where the deaths of two youths who were hiding from police in a power station set off 2005 riots.

Unemployment in and around its main towns of Saint-Denis and Bobigny is approaching double the national average at more than 18 percent. Three out of 10 of its 1.5-million-strong population are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, mostly from Africa, a similar proportion are classed as living in poverty.

The Paris games – which have a relatively modest budget by recent standards at around 7 billion euros ($8.27 billion), will leave behind two permanent new developments, both of them in Seine-Saint-Denis.

They are the Olympic Village itself, which will be converted after the games to provide more than 3,500 homes, and a swimming center to stand alongside the Stade de France stadium, built for the 1998 football World Cup, now to be reborn as the Olympic Stadium where track and field athletes will compete.

“Same in Sport”

At a run-down local pool that will be transformed into a water polo venue, children splashed as they played during a visit by Reuters.

“Sport brings people together,” said sports activity leader Jose Defaria, aged 22.

“Even if we don’t come from the same social background, I think we’re the same in sport, we are brought closer together and we make links and it’s good for everyone. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.”

Paris 2024 – enthusiastically backed by the country’s tennis-playing new President Emmanuel Macron – plans to make the most of the city’s existing sports facilities and take full advantage of its landmarks.

Boxers will compete alongside tennis players at the clay court French Open tennis venue, Roland Garros, on the city’s western fringe, while the nearby clubs Paris Saint Germain and Stade Francais will host respective sports of soccer and rugby.

Distance races on foot and bicycle will start and finish at the Eiffel Tower, in whose shadow the ever-popular beach volleyball competition will play out.

Fencing and taekwondo will be held under the majestic steel and glass of the Grand Palais near the Champs Elysees, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has bet her reputation on the Seine river being clean enough for open water swimming in time for the games.

Attacks Scared Tourists

Official confirmation due in September would mean one of the world’s most visited cities can mark the centenary of the 1924 Paris Olympics with a repeat showing. Amongst the stars of those games was U.S. swimming gold medalist Johnny Weismuller who later became known for his role in the Tarzan films.

Hoteliers are keen for a much-needed shot in the arm.

Although hotel occupancy rates are rising, up 7.2 percent at 76.9 percent in the first half of this year, they are short of the 80 percent rate hoteliers enjoyed in 2014 before Islamist militant attacks scared off tourists.

A successful Olympic legacy is far from assured for any city, with recent hosts enjoying contrasting fortunes.

The legacy of the Athens Games left derelict, run-down arenas and unused stadiums. Four years earlier, Sydney used the Games to develop an Olympic Park which is now a thriving commercial, residential and sporting suburb.

Four years after Athens, Beijing aimed to use the games to showcase itself as a progressive world power. London’s 2012 evoked a feelgood factor before domestic politics reversed that optimism. In 2016, while Rio’s games lacked a certain luster they underlined the South American nation’s ability to deliver in the face of economic and social adversity.
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Satellite Images Could Identify Slave Labor in India

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Researchers in England are hoping to help root out modern-day slavery in northern India by using detailed satellite imagery to locate brick kilns — sites that are notorious for using millions of slaves, including children.

A team of geospatial experts at the University of Nottingham use Google Maps and dozens of volunteers to identify potential sites of exploitation and report them to authorities.

“The key thing at the moment is to get those statistics right and to get the locations of the brick kilns sorted,” said Doreen Boyd, a co-researcher on the “Slavery from Space” project.

“There are certainly activists on the ground that will help us in terms of getting the statistics and the locations of these brick kilns to [government] officials.”

Anti-slavery activists said the project could be useful in identifying remote kilns or mines that would otherwise escape public or official scrutiny.

“But there are other, more pressing challenges like tackling problematic practices, including withheld wages, lack of transparent accounting … no enforcement of existing labor laws,” said Jakub Sobik, spokesman at Anti-Slavery, a London-based nongovernmental organization.

Millions of people in India are believed to be living in slavery. Despite a 1976 ban on bonded labor, the practice remains widespread at brick kilns, rice mills and brothels, among others.

The majority of victims belong to low-income families or marginalized castes like the Dalits or “untouchables.”

Nearly 70 percent of brick kiln workers in South Asia are estimated to be working in bonded and forced labor, according to a 2016 report by the International Labor Organization. About a fifth of those are underage.

The project relies on crowdsourcing, a process where volunteers sift through thousands of satellite images to identify possible locations of kilns. Each image is shown to multiple volunteers, who mark kilns independently.

The team is currently focused on an area of 2,600 square kilometers in the desert state of Rajasthan — teeming with brick-making sites — and plans to scale up the project in the coming years.

Researchers are now in talks with satellite companies to get access to more detailed images, rather than having to rely on publicly available Google Maps.

The project is one of several anti-slavery initiatives run by the university, which include research on slave labor-free supply chains and human trafficking.
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Researchers Explore Science of Gender Identity

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While President Donald Trump has thrust transgender people back into the conflict between conservative and liberal values in the United States, geneticists are quietly working on a major research effort to unlock the secrets of gender identity.

A consortium of five research institutions in Europe and the United States, including Vanderbilt University Medical Center, George Washington University and Boston Children’s Hospital, is looking to the genome, a person’s complete set of DNA, for clues about whether transgender people are born that way.

Two decades of brain research have provided hints of a biological origin to being transgender, but no irrefutable conclusions.

Now scientists in the consortium have embarked on what they call the largest  study of its kind, searching for a genetic component to explain why people assigned one gender at birth so persistently identify as the other, often from very early childhood.

Researchers have extracted DNA from the blood samples of 10,000 people, 3,000 of them transgender and the rest cisgender (people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth). The project is awaiting grant funding to begin the next phase: testing about 3 million markers, or variations, across the genome for all of the samples.

Knowing what variations transgender people have in common, and comparing those patterns to those of cisgender people in the study, may help investigators understand what role the genome plays in everyone’s gender identity.

“If the trait is strongly genetic, then people who identify as trans will share more of their genome, not because they are related in nuclear families but because they are more anciently related,” said Lea Davis, leader of the study and an assistant professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute.

Political arena

The search for the biological underpinnings is taking on new relevance as the battle for transgender rights plays out in the U.S. political arena.

One of the Trump administration’s first acts was to revoke Obama-era guidelines directing public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice.

Last week, the president announced on Twitter he intends to ban transgender people from serving in the military.

Texas lawmakers are debating a bathroom bill that would require people to use the bathroom of the sex listed on their birth certificate. North Carolina in March repealed a similar law after a national boycott cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business.

Currently, the only way to determine whether people are transgender is for them to self-identify as such. While civil rights activists contend that should be sufficient, scientists have taken their search to the lab.

That quest has made some transgender people nervous. If a “cause” is found, it could posit a “cure,” potentially opening the door to so-called reparative therapies similar to those that attempt to turn gay people straight, advocates say. Others raise concerns about the rights of those who may identify as trans but lack biological “proof.”

“It’s an idea that can be wielded against us, depending on the ideology of the user,” said Kale Edmiston, a transgender man and postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in neuroimaging.

Dana Bevan, a transgender woman, psychologist and author of three books on transgender topics, acknowledged the potential manipulation of research was a concern but said, “I don’t believe that science can or should hold back from trying to understand what’s going on.”

No genetic test sought

Davis stressed that her study does not seek to produce a genetic test for being transgender, nor would it be able to.

Instead, she said, she hopes the data will lead to better care for transgender people, who experience wide health disparities compared with the general population.

One-third of transgender people reported a negative health care experience in the previous year, such as verbal harassment, refusal of treatment or the need to teach their doctors about transgender care, according to a landmark survey of nearly 28,000 people released last year by the National Center for Transgender Equality.

About 40 percent have attempted suicide, almost nine times the rate for the general population.

“We can use this information to help train doctors and nurses to provide better care to trans patients and to also develop amicus briefs to support equal rights legislation,” said Davis, who is also director of research for Vanderbilt’s gender health clinic.

The Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee has one of the world’s largest DNA data banks. It also has emerged as a leader in transgender health care with initiatives such as the Trans Buddy Program, which pairs every transgender patient with a volunteer to help guide the person through a health care visits.

The study has applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health and is exploring other financial sources to provide the $1 million needed to complete the genotyping, expected to take a year to 18 months. Analysis of the data would take about another six months and require more funding, Davis said.

The other consortium members are Vrije University in Amsterdam and the FIMABIS institute in Malaga, Spain.

Probing the brain

Until now, the bulk of research into the origins of being transgender has looked at the brain.

Neurologists have spotted clues in the brain structure and activity of transgender people that distinguish them from cisgender subjects.

A seminal 1995 study was led by Dutch neurobiologist Dick Swaab, who was also among the first scientists to discover structural differences between male and female brains. Looking at postmortem brain tissue of transgender subjects, he found that male-to-female transsexuals had clusters of cells, or nuclei, that more closely resembled those of a typical female brain, and vice versa.

Swaab’s body of work on postmortem samples was based on just 12 transgender brains that he spent 25 years collecting. But it gave rise to a whole new field of inquiry that today is being explored with advanced brain scan technology on living transgender volunteers.

Among the leaders in brain scan research is Ivanka Savic, a professor of neurology with Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and visiting professor at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Her studies suggest that transgender men have a weakened connection between the two areas of the brain that process the perception of self and one’s own body. Savic said those connections seem to improve after the person receives cross-hormone treatment.

Her work has been published more than 100 times on various topics in peer-reviewed journals, but she still cannot conclude whether people are born transgender.

“I think that, but I have to prove that,” Savic said.

A number of other researchers, including both geneticists and neurologists, presume a biological component that is also influenced by upbringing.

But Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has emerged as the leading voice challenging the “born-this-way” hypothesis.

He encourages psychiatric therapy for transgender people, especially children, so that they accept the gender assigned to them at birth.

McHugh has gained a following among social conservatives, while incensing LGBT advocates with comments such as calling transgender people “counterfeit.”

Last year he co-authored a review of the scientific literature published in The New Atlantis journal, asserting there was scant evidence to suggest sexual orientation and gender identity were biologically determined.

The article drew a rebuke from nearly 600 academics and clinicians who called it misleading.

McHugh told Reuters he was “unmoved” by his critics and said he doubted additional research would reveal a biological cause.

“If it were obvious,” he said, “they would have found it long ago.”
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Google Street View Cars Map Methane Leaks

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Finding underground gas leaks is now as easy as finding a McDonalds, thanks to a combination of Google Street View cars, mobile methane detectors, some major computing power and a lot of ingenuity.

When a city’s underground gas lines leak, they waste fuel and release invisible plumes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.  To find and measure leaks, Colorado State University biologist Joe von Fischer decided to create “methane maps,” to make it easier for utilities to identify the biggest leaks, and repair them.

“That’s where you get the greatest bang for the buck,” he pointed out, “the greatest pollution reductions per repair.”

 

Knowing that Google Maps start with Google Street View cars recording everything they drive by, along with their GPS locations, von Fischer’s team thought they would just add methane detectors to a Street View car. It turned out, it was not that simple.

“Squirrelly objects”

The world’s best methane detectors are accurate in an area the size of a teacup, but methane leaks can be wider than a street. Also, no one had ever measured the size of a methane leak from a moving car.

“If you’ve ever seen a plume of smoke, it’s sort of a lumpy, irregular object,” von Fischer said. “Methane plumes as they come out of the ground are the same, they’re lumpy squirrelly objects.”

The team had to develop a way to capture data about those plumes, one that would be accurate in the real world. They set up a test site in an abandoned airfield near campus, and brought in what looked like a large scuba tank filled with methane and some air hoses. Then they released carefully measured methane through the hose as von Fischer drove a specially equipped SUV past it, again and again.

They compared readings from the methane detectors in the SUV to readings from the tank.

“We spend a lot of time driving through the plumes to sort of calibrate the way that those cars see methane plumes that form as methane’s being emitted from the ground,” von Fischer explained.

 

With that understanding, the methane detectors hit the road.  

Turning data into maps

But the results created pages of data, “more than 30 million points,” said CSU computer scientist Johnson Kathkikiaran. He knew that all those data points alone would never help people find the biggest leaks on any map.  So he and his advisor, Sanmi Peracara, turned the data into pictures using tools from Google.

 

Their visual summaries made it easy for utility experts to analyze the methane maps, but von Fischer wanted anyone to be able to identify the worst leaks. His teammates at the Environmental Defense Fund met that challenge by incorporating the data into their online maps. Yellow dots indicate a small methane leak. Orange is a medium-size one.  Red means a big leak – as much pollution as one car driving 14,000 kilometers in a single day.

Von Fischer says that if a city focuses on these biggest leaks, repairing just 8 percent of them can reduce methane pollution by a third.

“That becomes a win-win type scenario,” he said, “because we’re not asking polluters to fix everything, but we’re looking for a reduction in overall emissions, and I think we can achieve that in a more cost effective way.”

After analyzing a methane map for the state of New Jersey, for example, the utility PSE&G has prioritized fixing its leakiest pipes there first, to speed the reduction of their overall pollution.

 

“To me that was a real victory, to be able to help the utility find which parts were leakiest, and to make a cost effective reduction in their overall emissions,” von Fishcher said.

 

Von Fischer envisions even more innovation ahead for mapping many kinds of pollution… to clean the air and save energy.
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WannaCry Hero Arrested in US After Hacking Conference

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U.S. security agents have arrested the British hacker known for discovering a “kill switch” that nullified a widespread ransomware attack earlier this year.

Marcus Hutchins, a 23-year-old malware researcher who uses the name Malware Tech, was detained by the FBI on Wednesday at the Las Vegas airport, where he was preparing to return to Britain after attending two hacking conferences in the city.

Court documents unsealed on Thursday indicated Hutchins was arrested on hacking charges unrelated to the ransomware attack known as WannaCry.

Reuters news agency reports Hutchins is accused of advertising, distributing and profiting from malware code known as Kronos that stole online banking credentials and credit card data between July 2014 and July 2015.

Hutchins has not made a public statement, but his mother told London’s Telegraph newspaper that she expected to be “rather busy tonight,” trying to find out where her son is being held.

Hutchins became an overnight hero in May after disabling the WannaCry worm, which infiltrated software in hundreds of thousands of computers in hospitals, schools, factories and shops in more than 150 countries. Parts of Britain’s National Health Service were infected, as well as the FedEx delivery company, German rail Deutsche Bahn and Spain’s Telefonica.

The attack first became evident May 12, 2017, and continued over the weekend. By May 15, Hutchins had discovered a so-called “kill switch” that disabled the worm.

The malware operators demanded the owners of the computers pay a fee of $300 to $600 to regain control of their computers.
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Facebook to Step Up Fact-Checking in Fight Against Fake News

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Facebook is to send more potential hoax articles to third-party fact checkers and show their findings below the original post, the world’s largest online social network said on Thursday as it tries to fight so-called fake news.

The company said in a statement on its website it will start using updated machine learning to detect possible hoaxes and send them to fact checkers, potentially showing fact-checking results under the original article.

Facebook has been criticized as being one of the main distribution points for so-called fake news, which many think influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The issue has also become a big political topic in Europe, with French voters deluged with false stories ahead of the presidential election in May and Germany backing a plan to fine social media networks if they fail to remove hateful postings promptly, ahead of elections there in September.

On Thursday Facebook said in a separate statement in German that a test of the new fact-checking feature was being launched in the United States, France, the Netherlands and Germany.

“In addition to seeing which stories are disputed by third-party fact checkers, people want more context to make informed decisions about what they read and share,” said Sara Su, Facebook news feed product manager, in a blog.

She added that Facebook would keep testing its “related article” feature and work on other changes to its news feed to cut down on false news.
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Mexico Sees End 2018 as Best Case for Implementing New NAFTA

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Under a best-case scenario, a newly negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would not be implemented before the end of next year or the start of 2019, Mexico’s economy minister said Thursday.

Among other issues, NAFTA talks would focus on how to provide more certainty in dispute resolutions, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said in a radio interview.

“According to the possible calendars of approval, the best of the scenarios that we could have … would be the start of implementation almost at the end of 2018 or the start of 2019,” Guajardo said.

Mexico has set out the goals of prioritizing free access for goods and services, greater labor market integration and a strengthening of energy security.

Last week, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said during a visit to Mexico that he hoped farm business with Mexico would not suffer due to President Donald Trump’s drive to get a better deal for manufacturers.

Speaking in Japan on Thursday, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said the best way to calm Trump’s worries about commerce with Mexico were through more trade, not less.

Videgaray said negotiators would need to be careful not to tweak trade rules on sourcing components too much or they could risk driving up the costs of goods like electronics.

“The important thing that we are not going to do is hurt the region’s competitivity, and much less the region’s consumers,” Videgaray said, according to a transcript.
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Top 5 Songs for Week Ending Aug. 5

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We’re in the mix with the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending August 5, 2017.

Lo and behold, we get a new song this week to supercharge our lineup. It happens in fifth place, where French Montana and Swae Lee jump four slots with “Unforgettable.”

Number 5: French Montana & Swae Lee “Unforgettable”

French Montana is Karim Karbouch – born in Morocco, he was 13 when his family immigrated to New York City. French made his first mix tape in 2007, and three weeks ago dropped his sophomore studio album “Jungle Rules.” This marks French Montana’s first appearance in the Top Five. Swae Lee is one-half of the rap duo Rae Sremmurd. You probably know them best from last year’s huge chart-topper “Black Beatles.”

Number 4: Dj Khaled Featuring Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance The Rapper & Lil Wayne “I’m The One”

Our next artist is a first-generation citizen of the United States. While DJ Khaled was born in New Orleans, his parents had immigrated from Palestine.

Khaled backtracks a slot to fourth place with his former champ “I’m The One” featuring Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance the Rapper, and Lil Wayne. On August 5, Chance will be in his hometown of Chicago for the annual Lollapalooza festival. In fact, all of the artists have concerts booked, except for Bieber.

Number 3: Bruno Mars “That’s What I Like”

Bruno Mars and DJ Khaled keep trading places in the Top Five, and this week, Bruno re-takes third place with “That’s What I Like.”

Bruno is currently on the North American leg of his world tour. In November, he and DNCE visit South America for six dates, and then next year it’s on to New Zealand and Australia. May 3, 2018, will also see Bruno perform at the Mall of Asia in the Philippines. It will be his third visit to his ancestral homeland.

Number 2: DJ Khaled Featuring Rihanna and Bryson Tiller “Wild Thoughts”

DJ Khaled remains in the runner-up slot with “Wild Thoughts” featuring Rihanna and Bryson Tiller. On July 26, Rihanna met with President Emmanuel Macron of France. They met in Paris to discuss educational initiatives. Rihanna is the global ambassador for the Global Partnership for Education.

Number 1: Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee Featuring Justin Bieber “Despacito”

Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber hold the Hot 100 title for an impressive 11th week with “Despacito.”

Justin recently canceled the remaining dates of his world tour and days later hit a photographer with his truck. The man wasn’t seriously injured. Justin’s biological father, Jeremy, flew from Toronto to Los Angeles to spend some quality time with his boy.

That’s it for now — we hope you’ll join us for next week’s lineup.
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HBO: Email System Likely Not Affected in Monday Hack Attack

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In an email to HBO staff Wednesday, CEO Richard Plepler said the company’s email system likely was not affected in Monday’s hacking of the cable network.

“We do not believe that our email system as a whole has been compromised,” Plepler wrote, warning his staff to be wary of media speculation about the breach.

A script outline for the next episode of Game of Thrones, along with episodes of Ballers, Barry and Room 104, were published online Monday.

A company called IP Echelon reportedly submitted a request to Google on behalf of HBO to take down the leaked material.

HBO has not publicly commented on specifically what material has been hacked, but the request claimed that “thousands of Home Box Office [HBO] internal company documents” had been leaked in addition to the video content.

According to Variety, the initial leak was much larger than first reported, and personal information about one senior HBO executive, as well as access information to dozens of online accounts, have been published since Monday.

The hackers, who claimed to have accessed 1.5 terabytes of information,

said more is coming.

If the claim is true, it would make this hack even larger than the crippling cyberattack on Sony in 2014, which the FBI has blamed on the North Korean government. North Korea denied the allegation.
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More Women Starting Businesses in US

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Women in the United States are starting bushiness at one and a half times the rate of their male peers. Effective entrepreneurship could help cut the economic gap between women and men, which the World Economic Forum says could otherwise take decades to close around the globe.  As VOA’s Jim Randle reports, experts say more than one-third of U.S. businesses are headed by women and they expect that percentage to grow.
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Trump May Boost Pressure on China Over Trade, North Korea

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U.S. President Donald Trump may soon attempt to increase pressure on China to change its trade practices and do more to stop North Korea’s weapons programs.  

Reports in the financial press say President Trump may sign an order as soon as Friday to start an investigation of Chinese demands that foreign companies share technology secrets in exchange for access to the massive Chinese market.  That investigation could, eventually, lead to higher tariffs on Chinese-made products headed for the U.S. market, which is the world’s largest. Trade experts warn the action might violate U.S. commitments under the World Trade Organization.  

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recently wrote that China’s trade practices, including forced technology transfer, are unfair, hurt U.S. exports, and contribute to a $347 billion deficit in the trade in goods between the United States and China.

As a presidential candidate, Trump harshly criticized China approach to commerce.  He has also said has said China, which is North Korea’s neighbor and major trading partner, could do far more to stop Pyongyang’s efforts to improve nuclear weapons and missiles.  U.S. experts warn that North Korean missile and bomb tests show that nation is a growing threat to the United States.

Trump’s tough stance on trade issues helped him win votes from working class voters who believe they have lost jobs due to unfair foreign competition.  His approach was a break with the traditional Republican pro-trade and pro-business stance.  Earlier this week, Trump’s Democratic party opponents accused Trump of talking tough about trade issues but failing to take effective action.

 
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Scientists: Deadly Heat Could Become New Normal

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New climate models show that parts of South Asia will become uninhabitable by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not dramatically reduced.

Under a high emissions scenario, where little action is taken to stop climate change, “the heat wave intensity will reach magnitudes that have not been observed before,” Elfatih Eltahir told VOA. Eltahir is a hydro-climatologist at MIT who co-wrote the report published Wednesday in the open-access journal Science Advances.

Ironically, the water that attracted humans to these regions will be what makes the environment intolerable. These won’t be the hottest places in the world, but the heat, humidity, high population density and poverty combined will make them some of the places with the highest risk for deadly heatwaves.

The researchers wanted their analysis to take both heat and humidity into consideration, so that it would be more relevant to human health. They modeled the so-called “wet bulb temperature,” which takes the actual temperature and subtracts the cooling one could hope to achieve though evaporation.

If the wet bulb temperature rises about 35°C (95°F), just below normal human body temperature, a person has no hope of dissipating heat. Under these conditions, even the healthiest individual in the shade, with water, will die after a few hours.

According to the heat index, a heat-humidity metric often used in weather reports, which adds humidity on top of temperature, a wet bulb temperature of 35°C would “feel like” 72°C (161°F).

The models showed that under the high emissions scenario, these temperatures would likely be met sometime during the last three decades of the century in the Ganges River valley, northeastern India, Bangladesh, the eastern coast of India, the Chota Nagpur Plateau, northern Sri Lanka, and the Indus valley of Pakistan.

That doesn’t mean the heat would regularly surpass these temperatures. “If the wet bulb temperature goes above 35 (Celsius), then everybody that’s outside basically dies so it’s a one-off sort of event that’s pretty terrible,” Alexis Berg, a hydro-climatologist at Princeton University, who was not associated with the study, told VOA.

The report did say that under the high emissions scenario, called RCP 8.5, approximately 30 percent of the world’s population would be regularly exposed to extremely dangerous wet bulb temperatures of 31°C (88°F). Under a lower emissions scenario, only 2 percent of the globe would be regularly exposed to those highs.

“RCP 8.5 is a death sentence for a large fraction of the world. It should be avoided at all costs,” said Matthew Huber, a climate scientist at Purdue University. “It does not require impossible effort to avoid RCP 8.5. The choice is very much ours to make.”

He noted that the study, which he was not associated with, is a much more thorough analysis than previous work. He told VOA via email, “This study explores multiple global climate models, multiple climate change trajectories, and also contains a much finer resolved depiction of the underlying physics.”

Everyone with whom VOA spoke emphasized that this future is very avoidable, but Berg also cautions, it could get worse. “Things don’t stop magically in 2100,” he said. “The world keeps warming.”
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