COVID-19 vaccination: Examining negative dominance on social media

It's not all negative

SOCIETY FOR DISASTER MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH, INC.

Research News

Vaccine negativity and reluctance didn't just emerge during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a recent study published in the Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness journal, authors from Loyola University Maryland and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health explored the appearance of negative dominance - a concept in which negative messages outweigh positive, solution-oriented messages in audiences' perceptions - in the context of COVID-19 vaccine-related information and activity online.

Prior research has looked at media coverage to identify vaccine concerns among the public and its impact on vaccine-related beliefs and behaviors, the spread of misinformation and fake news on the Internet, and the role of social media in aiding vaccine hesitancy, among others. Surprisingly, however, research to date has yet to explicitly explore negative dominance of vaccine-related information online using more recently developed tools for analyzing big data.

In the context of COVID-19, one of the greatest challenges for health and risk communicators has been dealing with the accompanying infodemic. The World Health Organization has defined the term as an overabundance of information, including false and misleading information, that causes confusion and can further threaten public health. In June 2020, 132 member states of the World Health Organization signed a cross-regional statement in which they declared the infodemic "as dangerous to human health and security as the pandemic itself." (Cross-Regional Statement) Social media platforms were used to spread mis- and disinformation, further exacerbating the infodemic. Adverse events related to the vaccine, such as reports of anaphylaxis and Bell's Palsy, gave fodder to those pushing anti-vaccination messages and promoting conspiracy theories. According to the study's lead-author, Dr. Paola Pascual-Ferrá of Loyola University Maryland, "While we did not find evidence of negative dominance of adverse events in the context of COVID-19 vaccine discourse on social media, that does not mean that there was no negative content circulating in social media platforms during the time we studied. What our study showed is that, compared to all other content, the number of posts focused on the adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccines, and levels of engagement for those posts, pale in comparison to all other content related to COVID-19 vaccines during the same time frame.

There are several potential explanations for this, which would require further research, but some of those explanations include the effectiveness of moderation efforts by the social media platforms to counter mis- and dis-information, as well as perhaps the emergence of new social norms that discourage people from promoting negative content."

Co-author Dr. Neil Alperstein of Loyola University Maryland reports that "After extracting posts from Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, with the Crowdtangle tool, we analyzed the data using Communalytic, a tool that, based on Google's Perspective API, measures the use of toxic language in online conversations."

Dr. Daniel Barnett, co-author, at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health notes that "This examination of online negative dominance during COVID-19 provides evidence-based insights that public health agencies can apply toward their crisis risk communication efforts in pandemic contexts. More broadly, this study also highlights the relevance of research on gauging online public sentiment during public health emergencies and the need for further examination of the degree of online negative dominance in current and future public health crises."

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Enabling the 'imagination' of artificial intelligence

USC researchers are enabling AI to envision the unseen, a technique that could lead to new medicines and increased autonomous vehicle safety

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

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IMAGE: NEW AI SYSTEM TAKES ITS INSPIRATION FROM HUMANS: WHEN A HUMAN SEES A COLOR FROM ONE OBJECT, WE CAN EASILY APPLY IT TO ANY OTHER OBJECT BY SUBSTITUTING THE ORIGINAL... view more 

CREDIT: CHRIS KIM

Imagine an orange cat. Now, imagine the same cat, but with coal-black fur. Now, imagine the cat strutting along the Great Wall of China. Doing this, a quick series of neuron activations in your brain will come up with variations of the picture presented, based on your previous knowledge of the world.

In other words, as humans, it's easy to envision an object with different attributes. But, despite advances in deep neural networks that match or surpass human performance in certain tasks, computers still struggle with the very human skill of "imagination."

Now, a USC research team has developed an AI that uses human-like capabilities to imagine a never-before-seen object with different attributes. The paper, titled Zero-Shot Synthesis with Group-Supervised Learning, was published in the 2021 International Conference on Learning Representations on May 7.

"We were inspired by human visual generalization capabilities to try to simulate human imagination in machines," said the study's lead author Yunhao Ge, a computer science PhD student working under the supervision of Laurent Itti, a computer science professor.

"Humans can separate their learned knowledge by attributes--for instance, shape, pose, position, color--and then recombine them to imagine a new object. Our paper attempts to simulate this process using neural networks."

AI's generalization problem

For instance, say you want to create an AI system that generates images of cars. Ideally, you would provide the algorithm with a few images of a car, and it would be able to generate many types of cars--from Porsches to Pontiacs to pick-up trucks--in any color, from multiple angles.

This is one of the long-sought goals of AI: creating models that can extrapolate. This means that, given a few examples, the model should be able to extract the underlying rules and apply them to a vast range of novel examples it hasn't seen before. But machines are most commonly trained on sample features, pixels for instance, without taking into account the object's attributes.

The science of imagination

In this new study, the researchers attempt to overcome this limitation using a concept called disentanglement. Disentanglement can be used to generate deepfakes, for instance, by disentangling human face movements and identity. By doing this, said Ge, "people can synthesize new images and videos that substitute the original person's identity with another person, but keep the original movement."

Similarly, the new approach takes a group of sample images--rather than one sample at a time as traditional algorithms have done--and mines the similarity between them to achieve something called "controllable disentangled representation learning."

Then, it recombines this knowledge to achieve "controllable novel image synthesis," or what you might call imagination. "For instance, take the Transformer movie as an example" said Ge, "It can take the shape of Megatron car, the color and pose of a yellow Bumblebee car, and the background of New York's Times Square. The result will be a Bumblebee-colored Megatron car driving in Times Square, even if this sample was not witnessed during the training session."

This is similar to how we as humans extrapolate: when a human sees a color from one object, we can easily apply it to any other object by substituting the original color with the new one. Using their technique, the group generated a new dataset containing 1.56 million images that could help future research in the field.

Understanding the world

While disentanglement is not a new idea, the researchers say their framework can be compatible with nearly any type of data or knowledge. This widens the opportunity for applications. For instance, disentangling race and gender-related knowledge to make fairer AI by removing sensitive attributes from the equation altogether.

In the field of medicine, it could help doctors and biologists discover more useful drugs by disentangling the medicine function from other properties, and then recombining them to synthesize new medicine. Imbuing machines with imagination could also help create safer AI by, for instance, allowing autonomous vehicles to imagine and avoid dangerous scenarios previously unseen during training.

"Deep learning has already demonstrated unsurpassed performance and promise in many domains, but all too often this has happened through shallow mimicry, and without a deeper understanding of the separate attributes that make each object unique," said Laurent Itti, a professor of computer science. "This new disentanglement approach, for the first time, truly unleashes a new sense of imagination in A.I. systems, bringing them closer to humans' understanding of the world."

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FROM THE ARCHIVE

Pandemics, Politics and the Spanish Flu
One of the worst plagues in human history is largely forgotten now.

 For our own sakes, it’s time to remember what happened.
By Crawford Kilian| TheTyee.ca
2017
Tyee contributing editor Crawford Kilian blogs about the politics of public health on his blog H5N1.

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
Laura Spinney
Jonathan Cape (2017)
“The Spanish flu,” Laura Spinney tells us, “infected one in three people on earth, or 500 million human beings. Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918 and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population — a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it. …It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.”

Yet when it was over, a kind of stunned silence fell on the survivors. People might talk about the carnage of the First World War and the resulting revolutions, but not about the much greater slaughter they had personally witnessed in their own homes and workplaces. My own grandparents, who had small children in 1918 and ’19, never mentioned the flu pandemic.

Part of that silence is thanks to the human tendency to pay more attention to some deaths than to others. The 3,000 deaths in the 9/11 attack are trivial compared to the 64,000 drug-overdose deaths the U.S. suffered last year, or the 660,000 worldwide malaria deaths so far this year. The 9/11 deaths changed the world, while we shrug off far greater death tolls.

But the silence after the pandemic was also like many soldiers’ PTSD: the survivors didn’t much want to talk about an experience that seemed to have neither cause nor remedy.


Spinney, who is both a science writer and novelist, is far enough removed from the pandemic to gain perspective on it, and storyteller enough to condense a global disaster into a chain of vivid stories linked by lucid explanation. In the process, she evokes a world that seems both farther from us than a mere century, and also uncomfortably close.
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Nobody knew anything

Nobody knew anything in 1918. The germ theory of disease, a few decades old, was as controversial then as climate change is now. “Virus” was a medical buzzword for “something we can’t see in a microscope that must be causing this or that disease.”

Even the word “influenza” was a hand-me-down from the Middle Ages, when the diagnosis for many ailments was the “influence” of the stars. The 19th century had seen many outbreaks of a respiratory disease called influenza, including the “Russian flu” of 1890 that had killed a million people. Less fatal flu outbreaks occurred yearly, as they continue to do.

So a wave of flu in the spring of 1918 didn’t stir much alarm though it killed more people and those of a younger age than usual — especially in the armies still locked in trench warfare. So many soldiers fell ill that a major German offensive — intended to knock France and Britain out of the war before the U.S. arrived — failed. Even though French and British soldiers were sick as well, they had the advantage of defence. (The Americans, meanwhile, were dying aboard their troop ships en route to the front.)

Most histories of the Spanish flu focus on events in Europe and the U.S., but Spinney’s scope is world-wide. Here is where her book distinguishes itself — by detailed scrutiny of the response to the pandemic in places like Brazil, China and India. All were baffled by the disease and by its seeming randomness. In the gold mines of South Africa’s Rand district, for example, black miners lived under crowded, unsanitary conditions that encouraged pneumonia. They fell ill with the flu, but most recovered. A week later, the flu hit Kimberley’s diamond mines — and the death rate was 35 times that of the gold miners.

Culture played a crucial role. In Spain, a charismatic bishop in the city of Zamora drew crowds into the churches to offer prayers to St. Rocco, the patron saint of plague, making the spread of flu much easier. The authorities tried to forbid mass gatherings; the bishop said they were interfering in church affairs.

Elsewhere, politics promoted the flu. In the Philippines, the Americans who’d occupied the islands 20 years before didn’t try to protect the local population except for a camp where Filipinos were training to join the U.S. war effort. Flu killed an estimated 80,000 Filipinos.

But the flu also promoted politics. After the Russian Revolution and civil war, Lenin brought in the first modern public healthcare system (at least for urban Russians). He asked doctors to make epidemic and famine prevention their top priority because flu and famine had nearly wiped out the Russian working classes.

Before that, however, flu had influenced not only the war but also the peace conference that followed. Woodrow Wilson almost certainly contracted Spanish flu en route to the Paris peace conference in 1919, and like many other cases, he suffered cognitive harm. His illness may also have helped cause the stroke he suffered a few months later; it left him crippled and unable to persuade Congress and the Senate to back the League of Nations.

In India, Mohandas Gandhi contracted flu. Already a leading figure in the struggle against British rule, Gandhi was temporarily unable to act as the epidemic aggravated a drought-related famine. But some of his followers began to build a grassroots organization to provide influenza relief — laying the groundwork for future liberation campaigns.

When Gandhi did recover, he was still too weak to control the response to a British bill that continued the rule of martial law in India after the end of the war. That bill, says Spinney, led to the Amritsar Massacre in April 1919, when brigadier general Reginald Dyer ordered his soldiers to fire into an unarmed crowd of protesters. Somewhere between 400 and 1,000 died. The slaughter was the beginning of the end of the British Raj.

The silence of the artists


If culture influenced influenza, influenza also influenced culture. Spinney explores the eerie silence about the pandemic in the work of 1920s writers. She argues that flu led to a general melancholy among artists, rather than works dramatizing its impact on individuals and communities.



From this she makes an interesting further case: We remember wars and then gradually forget them, while we forget pandemics and then gradually remember them. So, 72 years after the end of the Second World War, we contend with neo-Nazis while we also begin to sense what a shattering event the 1918-19 influenza pandemic really was.

A century later, we are far better equipped to deal with the next flu pandemic but also more vulnerable to it. The 2009-10 “swine flu” pandemic travelled at the speed of modern air travel; British schoolgirls brought it home from a holiday trip to Mexico. It killed over 200,000, a number too small to earn respect. In B.C., we had more than 1,000 cases and a mere 56 deaths — and promptly forgot them all.

The next influenza — whether H5N1, H7N9, or some other strain — could kill a magnitude more. As Santayana famously observed, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If we can’t reconstruct our memories of the Spanish flu quickly enough, millions more will die in the next pandemic.

How Bad Can a Flu Be?
Lethal to thousands is the answer. B.C.’s last pandemic proved that fear and denial are grave public health hazards

By Crawford Kilian 23 Feb 2004 | TheTyee.ca

Crawford Kilian was born in New York City in 1941. He was raised in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and was educated at Columbia University (BA ’62) and Simon Fraser University (MA ’72). He served in the US Army from 1963 to 1965, and moved to Vancouver in 1967. He became a naturalized Canadian in 1973.

Crawford has published 21 books -- both fiction and non-fiction, and has written hundreds of articles. He taught at Vancouver City College in the late 1960s and was a professor at Capilano College from 1968 to 2008. Much of Crawford’s writing for The Tyee deals with education issues in British Columbia, but he is also interested in books, online media, and environmental issues.

Reporting Beat: Education, health, and books

Crawford’s Connection to BC: Though he was born in New York City, one of Crawford’s favourite places is Sointula, a small town off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island.




October 5, 2004: Vancouver reports its first case of New Flu, already labeled a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The virus has moved around the world with frightening speed from Europe, where it was first identified just a few weeks earlier.

October 11: Three hundred cases of New Flu have been confirmed in Vancouver.

October 20: Vancouver has three thousand cases of New Flu, one thousand reported in the past 24 hours. The pandemic has swamped the city’s health system.

This is the spike of the first wave. By the end of the year Vancouver’s total cases number about 28,000 and 3,700 of them have been fatal. Two smaller waves hit, one in mid-January 2005 and the last in February and March. By mid-2005, New Flu has vanished. Vancouver’s total cases have numbered 170,000; 5,000 have died.


Vancouver is not alone. A quarter of the province’s 4,000,000 people have fallen ill, and 37,000 are dead. Most of the deaths are among those aged 20 to 40. BC First Nations fatalities total almost 10,000, including many children and elderly. Nine and half million Canadians have suffered New Flu, and 285,000 are dead.
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This science-fiction scenario assumes only that New Flu is just as deadly as Spanish flu was between October 1918 and March 1919; I have simply scaled up the numbers to reflect our much larger population. In 1918, for example, an estimated 30,000 of Vancouver’s 100,000 residents caught the flu, and 900 died. Of the 4,000 province-wide deaths in 1918-19, over 1,000 were of First Nations. The city now holds almost 600,000; we could therefore expect a sixfold increase in cases and fatalities.

According to the new Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan, a flu pandemic could kill between 11,000 and 58,000 Canadians while making 2.1 million to 5 million ill. No doubt we could fight flu more effectively than our great-grandparents did. But it’s instructive to see how they coped 85 years ago.

A forgotten disaster

Surprisingly, very little has been written about the impact of the Spanish flu in B.C. Local historian Margaret Andrews published an account of Vancouver’s response in BC Studies in 1977. In 1999, also in BC Studies, Mary-Ellen Klem described the devastation inflicted by the flu on BC’s First Nations. Elsewhere it receives only passing mention, a mere footnote to the end of the war. It was almost as if the experience had been blanked from our collective memory.

Vancouver had seen it coming. The first flu cases had appeared in Europe in June 1918, and returning soldiers that summer and fall had carried it to towns and cities across the country. Like other Canadian communities, Vancouver couldn’t cope.

Many doctors and nurses were still serving in Europe, and only about 200 nurses were available in Vancouver. Almost half of them were unavailable for duty when the second wave of flu hit in January 1919; they were either ill themselves or caring for their own families. Vancouver’s patient-doctor ratio was the highest it had been in a decade-680 to 1. The city’s Medical Health Officer, Dr. Frederick Underhill, had to find the resources both to limit the spread of the disease and to treat those who fell ill.

Prevention amounted to basic hygiene: avoiding crowds, covering coughs, plenty of fresh air. The city government, however, wanted more drastic steps. “Town closure” meant a ban on public gatherings, and the shutting down of schools, churches, and recreational facilities. Many flu-stricken North American cities had shut themselves down in this way, but Underhill didn’t see the point. Closing schools would only put kids out on the street, exposed to infection without even a careful teacher’s observation of possible symptoms

As well, Underhill pointed out, no one was ready to shut down business and industry. People would still be exposed to infection. (He was vindicated by the SARS outbreak in Singapore last year. Freed from school, kids wandered cheerfully through the downtown crowds of workers and shoppers.)

Vancouver shuts down

But within 10 days of the first flu case, political pressure forced the closure of Vancouver schools-which in any case were half-empty thanks to parental fear. A few days later, Underhill called for banning all public assemblies except in factories, stores and businesses.

The health-care system was also facing patients from outside the city, including many being brought in from smaller communities and even logging camps. Vancouver’s hospitals (St. Paul’s and Vancouver General) couldn’t handle all the cases, so closed schools became impromptu wards. King Edward School, next to VGH at 12th and Oak, was equipped to handle a thousand cases, staffed by school-board doctors and nurses. Strathcona School, on the east side, became a hospital for the Japanese community.

By the time the second wave hit, town closure was over, schools were open again, and authorities had to find new facilities. A 150-bed temporary hospital was built on the grounds of VGH.


Meanwhile, Andrews notes, it was business as usual. Car dealers were urging Vancouverites to buy their own “comfy and speedy Ford Car” rather than risk infection on crowded streetcars. Companies cranked out flu masks and veils, and druggists raised the price of camphor from 40 cents a pound to $6.50 in one week.

In an unlikely alliance, union members in the Metal Trades Council and Boiler Makers’ Union joined with the Employers’ Association to help create a central organization to fight the flu. Class conflict soon returned, however, with the Civic Employees’ Union threatening to strike. Since they represented employees in the water works, hospitals, health department, and cemetery, they got most of what they demanded.

Fear and denial

Meanwhile, the public ignored bans on public gatherings. The same parents who kept their kids out of school would then drag them to Victory Loan rallies, or to welcome the troops returning home. Vancouver even enjoyed two wild Armistice Nights: a false alarm on November 7, and the real thing four days later, with huge crowds celebrating in the streets. But movie attendance dropped, newspapers were smaller, and many offices were closed.

If Vancouver was good at ignoring its own pandemic, it was even better at ignoring the catastrophe afflicting BC’s First Nations. Mary-Ellen Klem’s article describes a disaster far worse than that afflicting white and Asian Canadians. Whole villages were infected; whole families were struck at once, with the living unable even to get up to bury their dead.

Klem says the BC native death rate from flu was nine times higher than for non-natives. While non-natives tended to die in their 20s and 30s, First Nations young people and elders were among the flu’s victims. This seems at least partly the result of widespread TB and other respiratory diseases, often contracted in residential schools. In 1907, a study had shown that 70 percent of young people who had graduated from such schools on the Prairies were dead within 15 years, mostly from TB.

The First Nations also felt betrayed by their white administrators, who had discouraged their former culture and assured them that life would be much better if only they would live like whites. In the event, even the white doctors assigned to First Nations reserves did little or nothing to ease the suffering.

Public health advances

A pandemic now would, we can hope, inflict much less damage on B.C. As with SARS, we could isolate early cases, master the virus’s genome, and perhaps find a vaccine within a few months. Sanitation would reduce the rate of transmission. Medical technology would save people who in 1918 would have been beyond help.

Yet we could still succumb to panic and denial, especially with modern media playing to our fears. Class and ethnic divisions could appear, just as SARS triggered some irrational avoidance of Chinese persons and businesses. Our health-care system, already stretched as it is, might not respond as powerfully as it would need to-especially when it still had to care for large numbers of regular patients.

The new Influenza Pandemic Plan is clearly a step in the right direction. But the next pandemic could well test our character far more harshly than our medical resources.

Crawford Kilian teaches at Capilano College and writes regularly for The Tyee. Among his books is Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia (Douglas & McIntyre, 1978).

Study finds vaccine hesitancy lower in poorer countries

New study examines vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in 10 low- and middle-income countries in Asia, Africa, and South America

INNOVATIONS FOR POVERTY ACTION

Research News

 

IMAGE: A VACCINATION IN CENTRAL JAVA, INDONESIA view more 

CREDIT: FADIL FAUZI

New research published in Nature Medicine reveals willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine was considerably higher in developing countries (80% of respondents) than in the United States (65%) and Russia (30%).

The study provides one of the first insights into vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in a broad selection of low- and-middle income countries (LMIC), covering over 20,000 survey respondents and bringing together researchers from over 30 institutions including the International Growth Centre (IGC), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), WZB Berlin Social Science Center, the Yale Institute for Global Health, the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE), and HSE University (Moscow, Russia).

Personal protection against COVID-19 was the main reason given for vaccine acceptance among LMIC respondents (91%), and concern about side effects (44%) was the most common reason for vaccine hesitancy. Health workers were considered the most trusted sources of information about COVID-19 vaccines.

The study comes at a critical juncture when vaccine shipments are still slow to arrive to the majority of the world's population, and COVID-19 cases are surging in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The findings suggest that prioritizing vaccine distribution to low- and middle -income countries should yield high returns in expanding global immunization coverage.

"As COVID-19 vaccine supplies trickle into developing countries, the next few months will be key for governments and international organizations to focus on designing and implementing effective vaccine uptake programs," said Niccoló Meriggi, Country Economist for IGC Sierra Leone and study co-author. "Governments can use this evidence to develop communications campaigns and systems to ensure that those who intend to get a vaccine actually follow through."

The researchers, who conducted the surveys between June 2020 and January 2021, point out that vaccine acceptance may vary with time and with the information that people have available to them. While the evidence on the safety and efficacy of available COVID-19 vaccines has become more clear in the last six months, severe, but rare, side effects may have undermined public confidence.

Saad Omer, Director of the Yale Institute of Global Health and study co-author, said: "What we've seen in Europe, the US, and other countries suggests that vaccine hesitancy can complicate policy decisions, thereby hindering rapid and widespread vaccine uptake. Governments in developing countries can start engaging trusted people like health workers now to deliver vaccine messaging about side effects that is accurate, balanced, and easily available to the public."

"Across countries, we observe that acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is generally somewhat lower than for other vaccines, perhaps because of their novelty. However, the consistently pro-vaccine attitudes we see in low and middle income countries give us reason to be optimistic about uptake," said Alexandra Scacco, Senior Research Fellow at the WZB and study co-author. "We hope that evidence from our study can help inform strategies to expand global COVID-19 vaccination."

CAPTION

Application of the first pfizer vaccines against COVID 19 in Colombia.

CREDIT

Harold Parraga

USAGE RESTRICTIONS

New long-term satellite analysis shows "plum" rainy season wetter now than ever before

Meiyu-Baiu fronts in the most recent decade the wettest on record

TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: (UPPER) CHANGES IN RAINFALL LEVELS BETWEEN THE 2000'S AND THE 2010'S. (LOWER) FREQUENCY OF PRECIPITATION (0.5MM/HR) AND HEAVY PRECIPITATION (10.0MM/HR) DURING THE MEIYU-BAIU SEASON OVER THE YEARS.... view more 

CREDIT: TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have analyzed long-term precipitation radar data from satellites and found significantly enhanced rainfall over the most recent decade during the annual Meiyu-Baiu rainy season in East Asia. The data spans 23 years and gives unprecedented insight into how rainfall patterns have changed. They showed that the increased rainfall was driven by the decadal increased transport of moisture from the tropics and frequent occurrence of the upper tropospheric trough over the front.

From the second half of June to the first half of July every year, East Asia is subject to a particularly rainy spell known as the Meiyu (in China) or Baiu (in Japan) season or "plum rains," from the ripening of plums along the Yangtze River. They are triggered by the so-called Meiyu-Baiu front, where the flow of moist air around the Asian monsoon region meets anti-cyclonic flows around the rim of the western North Pacific subtropical high (WNPSH). Though they bring much needed water to the region, recently, it seems that the floods they trigger have taken a deadly turn, with widespread destruction; flooding in China and Japan in 2020 was particularly devastating. For scientists and policymakers, it is vital that this be put within the framework of a bigger picture: are these simply anomalies, or are they here to stay?

Though studied in much depth, the majority of studies use rainfall gauge measurements and observations of cloud activity around land. An overall picture of rainfall throughout the region was lacking, particularly analyses which spanned long periods of time. Now, a team led by Assistant Professor Hiroshi Takahashi have examined satellite data featuring radar measurements of precipitation. They combined two sets of data, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM). The full set of data spans 23 years and covers both the sea and the land with equal precision. Through careful analysis of the time series, they confirmed a significant elevation in rainfall over the past decade. In particular, they showed that there has been a clear increase in the number of extreme precipitation events, the kind that can trigger natural disasters.

The question is why it has changed. The team focused on two aspects of the development of rainfall, the transport of moisture and changes in the flow of air in the upper troposphere. Firstly, they showed that there has been increased transport of water vapor along the rim of the WNPSH, largely due to decreased tropical cyclone activity, a trend seen both in decade-to-decade comparisons and the devastating season of 2020. Furthermore, they showed there were anomalous circulations in the upper troposphere, creating a "trough" that drove air upwards around the western edge of the Meiyu-Baiu front, strongly correlated with enhanced rainfall.

Through a full analysis of data encompassing a far larger area and a longer time span than before, the team's findings put the recent changes in the Meiyu-Baiu season in East Asia within the framework of a globally changing climate. They hope that new standards for average rainfall are reflected in new standards of disaster prevention.

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This work was supported by a KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (No. 19H01375), the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan (Grant No. JPMEERF20192004), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency/Earth Observation Research Center (PI No. ER2GPF012).

Argentina takes action against foreign oil companies operating on South Atlantic continental shelf

Thursday, July 8th 2021 
The companies had been served discouraging notes, Filmus said

Argentina's Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Energy Wednesday announced sanctions were to be imposed on three companies for operating illegally in the South Atlantic.

According to the Argentine authorities, the companies were dedicated to the exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons on the Argentine Continental Shelf, in the northern Falklands basin.

Two of the companies are British and the other Israeli, authorities said during a joint press conference by the Malvinas, Antarctica and South Atlantic Secretary Daniel Filmus, and his Energy colleague Darío Martínez.

The British-based Chrysaor Holdings Limited and Harbor Energy Plc. companies and the Israeli Navitas Petroleum LP were being served notices for breaching Argentine hydrocarbon laws, passed in 2011 and 2013, which require companies operating on the continental shelf to have express authorization from the Argentine government.

Sanctions range from a disqualification of between 5 and 20 years to work in Argentina, in addition to fines which can entail preventive embargoes.

The companies now have 20 business days to exercise their defence.

“The companies are not authorized to operate nor have they requested authorization and that is why we started this process, which has to do with notification and sanctions. The Ministry of Energy provided the technical knowledge and records and then the Foreign Ministry will continue with the claims,” Martínez explained.

Filmus also highlighted that these companies were served discouragement notes last year but they carried on nevertheless. He also pointed out that Argentina's actions in this regard have been backed by multilateral organizations such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac), Mercosur and the Ibero-American Summit.

The Argentine Secretary also said that these organizations issued “resolutions for there to be a bilateral negotiation in the dispute with the United Kingdom”, but also invoked resolution 31/49 of the United Nations “which establishes that none of the two parties can have a unilateral action”.

Filmus added that these three companies will be added to the other eight oil companies that were sanctioned for the same issue between 2011 and 2015.



(Source: Telam)

MISS THE SMELL OF GASOLINE?? 

JUST FOR KENNEY AND CABINET

FNORD JUST LAUNCHED A FUEL-SCENTED PERFUME SPECIALLY FOR EV OWNERS

BY SARANG SHETH 07/17/2021

In a bid to out-weird Elon Musk’s Tesla Tequila, Ford just announced a perfume that vaguely smells like gasoline, designed for EV owners who miss the wafting aroma of fossil fuels. The perfume even comes in a gas-pump-shaped bottle, and is rather cleverly named Mach-Eau, a play on the word “Macho” by combining Ford’s Mach-E with the French term ‘Eau’, often used to describe perfumes.

As Ford gradually makes its complete transition to electric vehicles (with the Mustang Mach-E and the electric F150 being announced in the past two years), they conducted a survey to find out what their customers missed most about petrol-powered cars. The results showed that “one in five drivers said the smell of petrol is what they’d miss most when swapping to an electric vehicle, with almost 70% claiming they would miss the smell of petrol to some degree.” Ford also claimed in a press release that Petrol ranked as a more popular scent than both wine and cheese, and almost identically to the smell of new books. Sounds weird, but also sounds about right, because strangely enough, I REALLY like the smell of petrol too… but enough to douse myself in a perfume that smells like it? Well, maybe not.

The company, however, made it clear as they unveiled their fragrance at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, that Mach-Eau doesn’t, in fact, smell entirely like gasoline, but rather draws on certain qualities of its aroma. Developed in partnership with renowned fragrance consultancy, Olfiction, “[The] Mach-Eau is designed to please the nose of any wearer; a high-end fragrance that fuses smoky accords, aspects of rubber and even an ‘animal’ element to give a nod to the Mustang heritage”, Ford mentioned in the press release. Be that as it may, the company hasn’t really put the Mach-Eau up for sale yet. Maybe it’ll come included with Ford’s next set of cars? Who ‘nose’. (get it? nose? knows?)

Designer: Pia Long of Olfiction (Client: Ford)


Developed with leading fragrance experts, Mach-Eau evokes traditional automotive scents

SPACE WARS

US to Build Spy Base in UK to Identify Threats to Satellites, Official Says

© Photo : Twitter/ United Launch Alliance (ULA)

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Talks are underway between the United States and the United Kingdom on the possibility of building a radar spy base in the UK which will focus on keeping satellites orbiting the Earth safe from threats, including attacks from China and Russia, US Space Force Lieut. Col. Jack Walker told the BBC.

Walker said that the UK and US were "in discussion" in regard to placing the radars "possibly in Scotland or further south."

The radars will have around 10 to 15 "parabolic antenna [large satellite dishes] for tracking and four to six for transmitting" and will cover an area of around 1 square kilometer (0.4 square mile).

© REUTERS / JOE SKIPPER
SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Delivers US Spy Satellite Into OrbitThe project is called the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC). It is being developed at the US Space and Missile Systems Center. In total, it is planned for three sites to be built: one in the UK, one in Australia, and another one in Texas.

The purpose of the base would be to "detect and track targets which could potentially be threats to our high-value assets" the colone explained.

"It could be from the Chinese, it could be from the Russians, it could be anti-satellite or it could be debris in space," he added.

DARC will not be the first US spy base in the UK. Other US spy bases based in the UK include RAF Flyingdales on Snod Hill in the North York Moors which provides an early warning system for incoming ballistic missiles.

SPACE WARS

UK ‘very interested’ in hosting US Space Force radar station

RAF chief says system to track objects up to 22,000 miles from Earth is ‘incredibly important’

RAF Fylingdales can only detect objects up to 12,000 miles away while the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability would look much further into space. Photograph: John Giles/PA

Mattha Busby
Sat 17 Jul 2021 

An American space force plan to develop a global monitoring system to track objects up to 22,000 miles from Earth could establish radar stations in the US, UK and Australia.

The head of the RAF, Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Wigston, is in the US for talks over the plans, and said on Saturday the British were “very interested” in the project and hosting one of the American radar stations.

China is challenging US military and technological dominance in a number of theatres, including in space. There are fears that anti-satellite arms held by Beijing – which Washington also possesses – are capable of threatening US orbital fleets.The Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (Darc) would require three radar stations around the globe with possible sites in the UK, US and Australia, Wigston said, in order to get a “full picture” of what is happening.

“The first priority above all is to understand what is going on in space. We know that it is becoming more congested; there were 1,000 satellites launched in the last year alone,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We see activity by countries like China and Russia which is a cause for concern. It is reckless activity, deploying and testing of systems that look like weapons in space. So any system like the radar we are talking about which gives us a better picture of what is going on is incredibly important to us.”

However, the new American military branch, US Space Force, established by former president, Donald Trump, has been criticised as an unwise and costly escalation that could lead to a dangerous new arms race.

A spokesperson for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade said the plans were “totally misguided” and that the money would be better spent on reducing poverty.

“The huge sums of money involved would be far better spent building fairer and more equal societies here rather than further militarising space,” they said.

The stations, covering around a square kilometre, would host an array of large radar dishes, known as parabolic antenna, each 15 metres in diameter.

The US already operates an early warning system to detect ballistic missiles in space, which includes a facility at RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. However, that can only detect objects up to 12,000 miles away while Darc would look much further into space.

Joe Mozer, chief scientist at the US Space Force, said: “We must overmatch our strategic competitors.”

Last month, Chinese scientists created a secure and potentially feasible chain of quantum communication along 428km of optical fibre, the longest terrestrial distance outside a lab, as part of efforts to create the world’s first unbreakable information link between orbiting crafts and their controllers.

Russia to inspire Myanmar for Rohingya solution

Diplomatic Correspondent | Published: 21:31, Jul 17,2021

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that his country would continue to encourage Myanmar to engage in dialogue with Bangladesh on Rohingya issues.

He said this in a meeting with his Bangladesh counterpart AM Abdul Momen in Tashkent on Friday after the latter requested Russia for an active and fruitful cooperation to facilitate the return of the Rohingya to their homeland and their reintegration there, according to a Bangladesh foreign ministry press release.

The two ministers were in the Uzbek capital to join an international conference on regional connectivity between central and south Asia.

In the meeting, Lavrov expressed commitment to completing the two nuclear projects in Bangladesh in 2023 and 2024 as per schedule in spite of the Covid pandemic.

The two expressed happiness at the level of mutual cooperation existing between Bangladesh and Russia.